The View from Here

My new window view.

After 16 years and four weeks, I got a window at work. My office is much brighter than it used to be, considering that "used to be" meant whatever light sort of filtered in over the bookcases and through the storage shelves. I thought I liked it that way, but since I spent today quite productively wrestling with statistics packages rather than morosely staring through my monitor into a black, black future, I am thinking that maybe light isn't a bad thing.

Public Service Announcement

If, like me, you regularly need terrain, elevation, and distance data at work and, like me, tend to have requests for map-based data answered with the question but what are the UTMs?, only for that answer to be, invariably, fuck if I know, a miracle has arrived. A gift from the mapping gods, who, previously unbeknownst to me, are named Zonum Solutions. They have a free online toolset that ties in with Google Maps and lets you get spot elevations, or set points to measure linear distance, or define a polygon to measure area and perimeter of spatial features. And--and, miracle of miracles--a window in the sidebar shows the UTMs for wherever you have the cursor positioned in the map.

Then, the FireShot add-on allows you to download the onscreen map (plus any lines or points you've drawn on it) into Photoshop to further muck around and save. I'm not sure about permissions for using the images you generate this way in publications, but at the least, you can generate nifty draft copies to hand to the AutoCAD guys down the hall, and make all the maps you want to hang on your wall.

Happy archaeologist.

Just another way the MaddowBlog serves the world.

Rain

The monsoon season continued to disappoint for the better part of two months. Oh, sure, clouds built up and danced around and even sometimes flashed lightning and growled thunder somewhere just out of reach, but the promised rain materialized exactly three times. Even then it didn't have the courtesy to put on a show during daylight hours when we might be able to watch the clouds with rising anticipation, waiting for the telltale gust of suddenly cool wind to cue the rain out of the wings and dance across the desert stage.

No, no, always at night, and usually in such wee hours that we were sound asleep and couldn't be roused to at least hear the water and hail tapdancing on the roof. Three summer mornings we awoke to sodden ground, crumpled programs of downed palm leaves and moraines of mesquite pods left by the rivulets of water across the yard like so much spilled popcorn kicked aside by the audience as it left, the curtain down, the show long over.

Until today. Today, finally, gloriously, afternoon clouds flung lightning to the ground close enough to knock out the power to the office, thunder rattled the windows before skidding off to the east along the curb of the Catalinas, rain slammed down in drops the size of bullfrog tadpoles. You want rain? I got yer rain right here. Rain rain rain, going on for hours now, the initial downpour replaced by steady sprinkles. The trash cans in the park down the street are all on their sides, dazed, accompanied by slightly less surprised tree branches; closer to home, my shovels have been blown across the yard, along with my buckets. Stacks of styrofoam cups that protected plants from the frost a lifetime ago, back when it still dipped below a hundred degrees here, have found new lodgings in the flower bed, the fence, the chiminea, possibly the neighbor's roof. The yard is a lake.

This is usually the time of year that the monsoon winds down, and after months of the near-daily routine of heat --> humidity --> clouds --> thunder --> SPLOOSH, we're usually about ready by now for it to be over. I wonder if it is still almost over this year, now that feels like it's just begun.

On We Go

Write every day, says my newly emerging star writer cousin. Write every day, says the wavering whispery voice that serves as my Jiminy Cricket at work, preferably about archaeology. Heh. Write every day, says my fantasy self in between doing sets of crazy weights and fending off Rachel Maddow's advances and pursuing a career that benefits humanity.

Fuck it, my kid's leaving, says dumpy tubby slacker me, and she sits staring blankly at the laptop, feeling vaguely guilty about not being more productive today and not spending more time reading to him when he was little and not playing Monopoly more often, contemplating checking the SunTran schedule to see when the next bus that might squash her head will be tooling by. Unless they're still on strike, that is; God, it's hard to keep track of these things sometimes.

I wonder if my mom felt this way as I was gearing up to go off to school. Unfortunately, at the same time she was also gearing up to pick up and move 900 miles away from South Bend to Dallas, so she may have been a bit distracted. She and my stepfather hit the road a week after graduation, my beagle sticking his head out of the back window of the old blue Pontiac as Mom waved frantically and disappeared up the hill and I stood in the driveway watching until they were gone and tried to absorb the fact that I was alone and home wasn't home any more. I looked through the windows at the empty rooms, half-heartedly rattled the locked garage door, and finally got on my bike and pedaled over to my German teacher's house to bunk for a while. A couple of weeks later I would shift back to the old neighborhood, this time to my English teacher's house down the block, where I lay on an improvised pile of cushions and blankets in the upstairs spare room and stared at the ceiling. I was two months shy of 18.

Eventually, the day after my birthday, I made my way to my dad's house in southern Illinois, riding the same bus south to Indianapolis I'd ridden a million times before, killing time during the two-hour layover, and finally taking an ancient I-V Coach on the last leg to Vincennes. Dad was there as usual to drive me across the river into Illinois, and after a week or maybe two he drove me farther west across another river to St. Louis, and I got on a plane and got off in a foreign country called Texas and maybe a couple weeks after that Mom flew me back up to Illinois, to Chicago, and after a few days she said I've got to let you go now and hugged me goodbye in the parking lot behind the dorm across the street and that was that.

I took the train home to South Bend several times, but it wasn't home any more without my mom and my house and dogs and bedroom, staying with different friends, occasionally running into acquaintances from high school with them and having to consciously remind myself that these were my former classmates too. It was far too easy to fall back into the third wheel mode I was used to from spending summers at my dad's, in the small town I'd lived in until I was nine, hanging out with old elementary school friends and trying to fit in with their high school friends but never quite having the right common frames of reference.

That was 25 years ago. I will be telling my son goodbye almost 25 years to the day after my mom told me goodbye. No matter how different the situation, the sense of unreality is the same. Home without him will not feel so much like home any more, and I will not feel so much like me.

Birthday Blog

43 years later, I guess I've done okay for myself. Birthday breakdown:

6:00 a.m.: girlfriend delivers coffee in bed (from Coffee Times, highly recommended if you find yourself driving on Speedway in the vicinity of Country Club).

7:00 a.m.: officemates show up with orange juice and champagne, respectively, and mimosas commence.

9:00 a.m.: meet my son at home and take off for Mt. Lemmon.

9:45 a.m.: arrive at Molino Canyon to find next to no water, but a few tiny tadpoles save the day.

Birthday tadpoles.

11:30 a.m.: son serves lunch of homemade coconut shrimp with (blue) lime sauce.

12:00 p.m.: first batch of cookies come out of oven.

1:30 p.m.: son accompanies me to gym.

2:30 p.m.: frozen pea application; SportsCenter.

6:00 p.m.: Girlfriend, both kids, and I hit Barrio. Tacos and beer.

sometime after that: happy collapse.

Bring on the 44th year.

Extra Time

I much prefer sports metaphors that open a little window of understanding life over sports metaphors that, well, define life.

Time is fluid in soccer. The match is supposed to last 90 minutes, but the referee may add time and allow play to continue if numerous injuries, substitutions, or other interruptions have conspired to prevent a fair full 90 minutes of competition. This makes for an agonizing experience when, say, your team has dominated possession and outplayed the other side and finally put a shot in the back of the net in the 89th minute. The clock rolls over 90:00 and you think the game's over, but because somebody's head got split open and had to be tended for a while, and somebody else needed lecturing after a yellow card, and the guys being substituted strolled off the field instead of sprinting, the referee says no, the game's not over yet. So you play on and wait and die every time the other team puts a shot on goal that takes a weird hop or deflects off a defender and you think goddammit, we had this thing won and you try to hold on until the whistle finally blows.

So now, after watching Vaughn Walker chest the ball off his own goal line and dribble circles around Prop 8 for the length of the field and fire an unstoppable shot into the top corner for a sure winner, we have extra time. Yeah, Walker put the first extra two minutes on the clock himself--the metaphor breaks down here a bit, but still--but now the 9th Circuit has added what feels like an entire additional half.

A federal appeals court decided Monday to put same-sex marriage in California on hold at least until December, interrupting the wedding plans of scores of gay couples who were hoping to exchange vows later this week.

We are told this is actually a good thing from a strategic standpoint, since it prevents the case from being prematurely kicked up to a Supreme Court that might not rule in our favor.

Loyola Law School professor Richard Hasen said Monday's order was strategically advantageous for supporters of same-sex marriage, no matter how disappointed many couples may be. If the panel had refused to place a hold on Walker's ruling, the supporters of Proposition 8 were prepared to seek a stay from the Supreme Court. The court is believed to be divided on the question of gay marriage, with Justice Anthony Kennedy considered a swing vote. A vote on a hold might have pushed the justices into taking an early position on the question.

"I think there are strategic reasons why even the most ardent supporter of gay marriage could opt for a stay," said Hasen, an expert on federal court stays. "The concern is that rushing things to the Supreme Court could lead to an adverse result [for supporters of gay marriage.] If this case takes another year to get to the U.S. Supreme Court, there could be more states that adopt same-sex marriage and more judicial opinions that reach that conclusion."

Hasen said the hold "takes the heat" off Kennedy and takes the case "off the front burner for a while."

I'm not sure how a year's extra time makes Judge Walker's findings of fact any more or less compelling to Justice Kennedy, nor am I sure how many more states are poised to adopt marriage equality instead of strengthening its prohibition. And I'm really not sure how the scoreboard showing states approving and states opposing any civil rights legislation is relevant to the Supreme Court's evaluation of the legislation's constitutionality. As much as I would love to see, say, 45 more states adopt marriage equality in the next year, that shouldn't be a necessary or even contributing condition to Anthony Kennedy deciding that the 14th Amendment really does still count, and that equality is not negotiable.

Yet again we are being told to just wait a little longer, to be patient, to let the dust settle and not pressure people in power, to see if maybe somebody somewhere in some other state will pick up the slack and do something, because if enough states do something, maybe it won't be so hard for the people who can do something federally binding to actually do it.

Hey, you've already played 90 minutes plus two, so what's two more, and two more, and two more after that? And if the other team manages to poke one in because you're exhausted and your keeper's screened? Well, you're used to losing, so no big deal, right? Right.

I Know What I Want for My Birthday

Specifically, what I want at 5 pm PDT on my birthday. To hear the California bells ringing all the way over here in the desert.

Final Stay Order

My current favorite four words in the English language, second only to here, have another beer: IT IS SO ORDERED.

You and Me Both

Another Day, Another Fail

Rachel Maddow's producer and chief blogger were in Arizona yesterday to have a look at the border fence in Nogales, talk to the Santa Cruz County sheriff, and wind down at the Tap Room at Hotel Congress in Tucson with a couple hundred Maddow fans. They brought hats to give away. I couldn't go.

The knees were too reluctant to bend in regular ways, and the wobbly legs wouldn't have managed a couple hours of standing in a crowd. *sob* I have not yet mustered the resolve to look at the blog to see the pictures.

The little building blocks making up the tower that tells me who I am are being yanked out one by one in a supremely irritating Jenga game--a knee here, an elbow there, a kid leaving home way over there, a hopeless romantic finally looking in the mirror someplace else--and pretty soon all I will have left is the irritation my father tells me I was born with, the surliness an old boss pointed out on a regular basis, a general air of death glare I am stunned to hear about every. damn. time. but which would go a long way in explaining repeated episodes of involuntary solitude over the years.

I am an object lesson in VSEPR theory. I wish I wasn't.

I'm Just Sayin'

If anybody should appreciate that basic human decency requires marriage equality, it should be a guy whose own parents could not legally marry in 26 of the states in the union when he was born. Somebody like, say, Barack Obama. I'm just sayin'.

If anybody should appreciate that separate does not mean equal, it should be a guy whose skin color would have relegated him to separate, crap accommodations and train cars and water fountains and bathrooms and hotel rooms, if he would have been allowed into one at all, a scant few years before he was born. And it should really be that guy if he grows up to be a fucking constitutional scholar. Somebody like, say, Barack Obama. I'm just sayin'.

If anybody promises to be a fierce advocate for a specific segment of society should that segment elect him to the presidency, he really ought to spend more energy fulfilling promises to the people who actually voted for him than placating people who did not and never will vote for him in the first place. He should not tepidly announce that he didn't really like Proposition 8 because it was sooooo divisive, and then trot out an aide to assure the conservative wing that he really really really doesn't think anybody afflicted by The Ghey should be allowed to get married, but should settle for a bargain-bin generic package with some of the same benefits--if individual states decide to do that; heavens, this can't be a federal matter--and be grateful for it.

If anybody pulls that kind of bullshit once, let alone over and over, he can forget about my money and my vote. I won't support someone who's happy to make me a second-class citizen.

I'm just sayin'.

More.

Loving v. Virginia was decided two months before I was born. Marriage equality continues to evolve on a timeline that parallels my own; California's Proposition 8 was ruled unconstitutional today, twenty years on the dot--and almost to the hour--from my own state-sanctioned opposite wedding. It was a long time ago and I was young and clueless.

Tonight I'm sifting through the reaction online and watching Maddow while nursing my stitched-up elbow. Judge Walker's findings of fact echo every argument for equality made on this blog and countless others. It's a dream ruling, written in dream language--fuck, I could have written big chunks of it, save for the inability to use the word fuck in judicial documents--and it appears to be watertight at a level I never dared hope for. In a judicial equivalent of holding the playground bully at arm's length with a hand on the forehead while he flails away impotently with fists that won't hit the mark, Walker issued a stay on his ruling that gives the H8ers until Friday to take their best shot at filing their appeals. Given the laughable lack of coherence the defense exhibited in his courtroom during testimony, I don't think he's very worried about what will happen when the case hits the Ninth Circuit.

Walker's ruling was heavily based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the same 14th that Sens. McConnell, Graham, McCain, and Kyl are so anxious to overturn that they can't help hopping from foot to foot. So boom, in one fell swoop the 14th becomes a rally point for attacking fecund Latinas and domestic-minded gays. The more interesting things get, well, the more interesting they get.

Ted Olson, one half of the team that argued against Prop 8, on Maddow tonight:

We've got to stop thinking about equality in terms of conservative or liberal. We need to start thinking about the fact that gay and lesbian citizens are our brothers and our sisters; they're entitled to equal places in our society. That should be a conservative value, it is also a liberal value, it is not something that should split us.

Von dein Mund, etc. And on we go.

And the Moral Arc of the Universe Bends a Touch Closer to Justice

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.

Details and commentary will be everywhere soon. The full decision is here.

True Colors Revealed to be, Unsurprisingly, Blindingly White

I wish I had written this, because it's so well done, but really I wish no one would ever have to write anything even approximating this in America. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, and bullheaded deliberate ignorance of our own laws, all in one tidy package courtesy of Russell Pearce and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and assorted nutters from the east and west.

Now it's not enough to cluck about illegal immigrants while pretending you're really talking about the Irish and Polish and Russian alongside the Mexicans, er, the Latin Americans, not enough to rage about oprimando el numero ocho para servicio en espanol and insist English is the official national language even though it isn't. Now all the pretense that it isn't really racism is being dropped, and it must come as such as a relief to be able to talk this way, about breeding seasons and dropping young like livestock, and stop pretending they ever thought these people were human in the first place.

"We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that's the way nature made it. Men don't drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do." That statement was being pushed by the author of Arizona's immigration law. He's not alone.

The neat distillation of current anti-immigrant thinking was in an email spread around by State Senator Russell Pearce, and cited by The Nation's Robin Templeton in a report on the recently revived, anti-immigrant rhetoric on birthright citizenship — the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that stipulates that babies born on American soil are automatically granted citizenship.

"It's invasion by birth canal," the leader of a California anti-immigrant ballot initiative told the Los Angeles Times. The head of an anti-immigrant group in Virginia called for an investigation into "whether or not illegal aliens have a preferred breeding season."

Read the full piece for the full revolting story.

America's Pastime Is Ripping My Heart Out

Goddamn baseball. Goddamn Cubs.

The Cubs ended a bad road trip that saw Ted Lilly and Ryan Theriot traded, the bullpen setting a major-league record by giving up 11 straight hits in a 12-run inning, Carlos Gonzalez becoming the fourth player in history to complete a cycle with a walk-off home run and Silva's heart episode Sunday.

Garblarghphawhargle. [/random unintelligible noises] This season can't end soon enough.

And the Immigration Blowup Continues to, Well, Blow Up

If your attention has been focused elsewhere this week--say, on cut-up and sewn-together joints, as mine has--you may have missed the news that a federal judge put the kibosh on several provisions of Arizona's new immigration law, specifically, the parts requiring cops to double as immigration agents and demand papers from anyone they stop who they think might be here illegally. A lot of people saw some very big red flags snapping in that breeze, and so, too, did judge Susan Bolton.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents. Sections barred from being enforced include:

• Requiring a police officer to make a reasonable attempt to check the immigration status of those they have stopped;

• Forbidding police from releasing anyone they have arrested until that person's immigration status is determined;

• Making it a violation of Arizona law for anyone not a citizen to fail to carry documentation;

• Creating a new state crime for trying to secure work while not a legal resident;

• Allowing police to make warrantless arrests if there is a belief the person has committed an offense that allows them to be removed from the United States.

"Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked," U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.

The predictable response reared its head, right on schedule.

The federal judge who halted parts of Arizona's immigration law is getting "thousands" of e-mails and phone calls, many in opposition to her ruling - and a few threatening her life.

A guy I play soccer with did not threaten the judge, but did post a status update on his Facebook asking if Bolton would give him back the $5000 he paid to go through the immigration/citizenship process when he came here from Greece. Another soccer acquaintance, this one from Poland, chimed in and said she'd like her 5k back too. Both said they don't see anything racist about SB1070 as it stands, and don't know why the hispanics think it's just targeting them instead of the Greeks and Poles and Chinese, and the Greek guy said he wouldn't mind carrying his passport and being questioned by a cop every day if that's what it takes to stop illegal immigration.

I try to avoid this kind of discussion on Facebook, so I did not post a response pointing out that (1) SB1070 has absolutely nothing to do with the legal citizenship process and thus isn't handing out fee waivers to every dehydrated Guanajuate who stumbles across the border, (2) the reason the Greek guy and Polish girl had the opportunity to fork over five grand and be welcomed with open arms in the first place is because (a) they came from countries whose quotas aren't filled and oh yeah (b) are, respectively, a software engineer and a cardiac nurse, not the (c) unskilled laborers from Latin America who would find themselves on a citizenship waiting list several generations long, and (3) if the Greek and Polish underclasses could walk here instead of having to pay for a boat or plane ride, it wouldn't just be the Mexicans and Salvadorans feeling like they have a target on their backs.

The Greek guy's wife is having a baby any day now. I wonder if Yorgos would always remember to take his passport and naturalization papers with him on the inevitable 2 a.m. runs to Walgreen's when the baby has a fever and he might not stay under the speed limit or come to a complete stop at every sign before turning. I wonder how excited he would be then to cooperate with a cop who thinks his skintone, beard, and accent mean he's not supposed to be here. I don't know why he doesn't think this could have happened to him, or why he thinks he would welcome the impingement of the freedom he shelled out all that cash to have. It's moot in any case, since Bolton's ruling ensures that he won't be faced with that situation, but I almost wish it wasn't. Because lots of shit sounds like it's a good idea, or would at least be tolerable, until it actually happens to you.

...

We have been a tad under the weather since Monday, with "under the weather" here meaning "operating with one functional limb." And it turns out that one-handed typing isn't as much fun as I'd been led to believe--who knew?--so posting will be light for a while.

Burning Questions

The pre-op check-in nurse is very nice on the phone. She goes through the vaguely familiar litany of questions--it's been six years since the last knee mishap, so some parts are foggy--starting with the actual spelling of my name, rather than the common two-letter transposition that turns me from half-Czech to all-Cuban, progressing to allergies and abnormal neurological history (seasonal and none, in order) with a side trip to consult the travel guide to East Narcotia (they all make me puke, hellooooo Advil) and finally to detailed directions on how to find the outpatient surgery department. She is adamant that the correct elevator is no more than ten paces from the door. I feel like a pirate.

One last thing, she says. Would you like a chaplain to come say a prayer with you before surgery? Hmmm. No. No, I would not. I would like a bartender to come pour me a shot of bourbon before surgery, if it's not too much trouble.

So I'm off for an overhaul on Monday morning, armed with my lucky boxers and a Sharpie for scrawling helpful notes and reminders for the surgeon all over my legs and arms. Right knee? Scope here pls. Left knee? Insert cortisone here. Right elbow? Slice and splice here pls. Left elbow? THIS IS THE ONLY FUNCTIONAL JOINT LEFT IN MY BODY NO MOLESTAR POR FAVOR KTHXBAI.

Stay tuned for the Boltgirl Frozen Peas Rehab Journal, sure to contain such exciting entries as Stationary Bike Chronicles and Honey I'm Ready for Another Gin and Tonic and Holy Fuck This Hurts.

Reunion

A few days ago I took a break from the interminable parent information sessions accompanying new student orientation at my son's university and spent an hour wandering the grounds and gardens on campus, getting to know the cool-and-mist-loving Pacific Northwest flowers and trees that are new to me. One flower in particular caught my eye, a stand of tall stalks topped with spiky balls in varying stages of bloom that shimmered purple.




















Half-bloomed, with bee; click to make life-sized.




















Fully bloomed, sans bee.

"They're wonderful, aren't they?" came a voice behind me. I turned to see an elderly man who I had not met, but whose crooked-toothed, lopsided grin was familiar.

He told me the plants were called globe thistles, and, chagrined, I glanced down at the thorn-tipped leaves and spiky stalks and said Oh, of course, a thistle, I should have looked at the foliage. These aren't like the thistles I grew up with. He smiled and told me about the globe thistles in his back yard, how they used to be covered with bees every summer, but that he hadn't seen a single bee this year and was worried that the hive had died or moved on. He asked where I was from and asked questions about saguaros and their flowers, and after a pause regarded the thistles again. "They're so fascinating, how different they look at different times. See these new ones that are all spiky and silver with a purple glow, and then these that have bloomed and are covered in almost a periwinkle?"

Yeah, I said, and then inside they have such a deep purple at the base of the blooms. Really striking. He leaned closer to a flower, examining it, and said, "You know, you're right. I'd never noticed that before. Nature is so wonderful when you take a moment to stop and just look at it. You'll always see something new," and I heard his words in his soft, measured voice and looked at his kind, gauzy eyes and gentle smile, and on that cool, overcast day a thousand miles from home I saw my grandfather again.

He wished me a good rest of my visit, I wished him luck with his bees, and he continued on to wherever he was walking. It was a good day.

Placeholder Posts? We Got 'Em!

I am freshly back from Seattle and am trying to remember what I do for a living. Please bear with us.

Oh.

Apparently the Pentagon is only trying to decide if they'll go with bright colors, neutrals, or camo for the new ghey-proof shower curtains they'll have to order if DADT is repealed. No segregation after all, Marine Commandant James Conway's musings aside.

Well, now that that's all cleared up, I'm off to the Pacific Northwest for a few days of gentle weather, good coffee, and damp green scenery. Don't trash the place while I'm gone, 'k?