Liz's Bloglet - Friday 4 July 2008

Instead of fireworks we got a terrific thunderstorm. We were at a friend's housewarming when the power went out--luckily we had citronella candles. The drive home was interesting because the power was out throughout town, the streetlights and traffic signals were out, and there were large pieces of trees blocking the roads. We got home to find our power on, and a very wet, irate Xedo who was not cheerful with us about the thunderstorm or the neighbors who were starting to emerge and shoot fireworks in the street. _
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10:13:51 PM, Friday 4 July 2008

A little something to make you weepy on a Thursday morning: Willa's Way _
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09:19:12 AM, Thursday 3 July 2008

For some reason Remi only sent me a link to this rather than blogging it, but it seems like something that should be shared with the world. _
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09:02:50 AM, Thursday 3 July 2008

One of my favorite bloggers is struggling with a recent diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. By sharing her struggle and remaining hopeful, she helps me keep having hope. As a bonus, there are not many other places on the internet where a single blog post unites a discussion of RA, Lost, and the story of Abraham and Isaac. _
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07:30:03 AM, Thursday 3 July 2008

I had a very good visit with the specialist at the practice with the soothing webpage. She has run a bunch of tests and had x-rays done. She has a couple of ideas of likely things. While they may be chronic, they are treatable. While waiting for the diagnosis I will begin physical therapy. She says I shouldn't feel this bad and is committed to working with me to feel better. Things are looking up. _
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01:58:56 PM, Wednesday 2 July 2008

I recently finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's account of her family's year spent eating only local food in the mountains of Virginia. I have never read a book of hers that I didn't love, and this is no exception. Her husband, ecologist Steve Hopp, provides some chunks of text featuring scientific and global perspectives on local food, while her daughter, Duke undergrad Camille Kingsolver, provides recipes and cooking stories.

I know many people have been converted by Michael Pollin or Supersize Me. For people who have more pragmatic, rather then ideological, questions about changing what they eat, Kingsolver's beautiful account of simply doing it may be more convincing. Besides simply describing getting some food from local farms as well as producing much of it themselves, she also includes practical discussions of cheese making, struggling with missing fruit, and the difficulty in trying to raise a self-sustaining turkey flock in a world that discourages the turkeys from reproducing the old fashioned way. In many ways, my favorite chapter was the last one, when the year was over and the family discussed what worked and what didn't, what they could keep doing for the rest of their lives, and things like pasta that just make more sense as mass produced food.

This morning I had an omelet with local eggs and chard, but grocery store cheese. For lunch I'll have potato corn chowder with all local ingredients except the butter. But the night before we had a Papa John's pizza. I am not a cultist and we haven't changed our entire lives, but local food tastes good and when it's just as easy to get as more international food it will remain my first choice. _
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10:04:22 AM, Saturday 28 June 2008

This makes me nauseous. And the fact that one has to look to the New Zealand press to investigate gross horribleness in the US military, doubly so. _
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08:13:13 AM, Saturday 28 June 2008

The PCUSA General Assembly just voted to delete from the Book of Order Section G-6.0106b ("Amendment b") which says "Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders or ministers of the Word and Sacrament."

Yesterday, they voted to delete a 1960's addition of homosexuality as a sin to the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the recognized historic confessions (along with its unhistoric edits). So, as of yesterday, homosexuality was no longer a practice the confessions call a sin, anyway.

My church has long "taken a scruple" on this (been in respectful disagreement with "Amendment b") in our Session and Diaconate. (Those keeping track at home who know that I was ordained a deacon last year see that I'm in violation.) The moderator of our Diaconate is a lesbian in a 10 year relationship and we have other gays and lesbians on both the Session and Diaconate, as well as other unmarried folks like me.

But it's about more than that. The PCUSA, and presbyterians in general, do not consider marriage to be a sacrament. There has been great controversy within the PCUSA about having gay weddings, which just seems preposterous to me because presbyterian marriage is the blessing of a civil arrangement, and nothing more. There's no reason the blessing has to be accompanied by the civil arrangement and there's certainly no reason that blessing has to fall upon a man and a woman rather than two men or two women. And there's no reason that blessing, or lack thereof, or that civil arrangement, or lack thereof, should have any bearing on whether or not people are called to serve the church. _
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04:40:14 PM, Friday 27 June 2008

A bumpersticker I would actually put on my car except for fear of the neighbors with their 3 Obama signs facing our house. _
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09:23:32 AM, Thursday 26 June 2008

Find the pitbull Many people attacked by a medium sized dog identify it as a pitbull, which gets recorded in the stats and has led to difficulty for pitbull owners in renting housing and getting insurance, as well as the banning of the breed from many municipalities. But most people couldn't actually tell a pitbull from any other kind of dog. I will say it took me about 12 guesses, and I've hung out with Tim and Amy's pitbull Frodo plenty. _
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09:18:24 PM, Wednesday 25 June 2008

In highly ironic headlines: James Dobson accuses Obama of `distorting' Bible _
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12:39:56 PM, Tuesday 24 June 2008

I've been solicited for two brand new pyramid schemes in the past month. One was an energy drink endorsed by Depak Chopra. The other claims to create drinking water by condensing moisture out of the air. I'm not going to name or link either of them for obvious reasons. I'm assuming as the economy ventures further into the toilet and unemployment rates continue to go up we will see more examples of the unique aspect of capitalism. _
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12:05:08 PM, Tuesday 24 June 2008

Public Service Announcement Time: Home Depot will now accept used compact fluorescent lightbulbs at their service desks and they will then be processed and recycled in a safe way. If you've been holding off on switching to them because of the disposal issues, maybe this will change your mind. They really do use a lot less electricity and last a lot longer than conventional bulbs. If like me you switched to them but have been wondering what will happen when they burn out, hopefully this helps. That is all. _
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11:48:42 AM, Tuesday 24 June 2008

These idiots from one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Durham have been arrested for a crime spree Four young men in a silver SUV yelled bizarre homophobic slurs at Remi, Mike, Deb, and I when we were hanging out in our front yard. I guess we're lucky they were only a little bored that night, and not so bored that they shot us for no particular reason. _
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02:59:59 PM, Monday 23 June 2008

Another question in the process of making my MacBook fancy: I can get student licenses of Windows XP and Vista for the same price--which should I buy? XP obviously has gotten all the bugs out and is the one I have been using for the past however many years. But sooner or later I would probably have to "upgrade" to Vista anyway, so should I just go ahead and do so? _
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02:05:27 PM, Monday 23 June 2008

So it's happened. The PCUSA has elected a member of Generation X as Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow is 39, and pastor of an apparently eclectic and interesting church in San Francisco.

I knew Bruce as a superstar at Montreat when I was in high school and when I worked there in college he helped run a couple of conferences. It is not surprising that he has both a Moderator Blog and a personal blog.

Presbyterians don't have bishops or stuff like that--all of our important decisions are made by elected representatives, including the choice of moderator. So he was elected by an Assembly whose representatives were elected within a Presbytery whose representatives are elected members of the Session of individual congregations. He used his Moderator Blog to campaign, an idea previously unheard of in moderator elections. His point was, a national governing board is most likely to choose people who are already part of the establishment because they just don't know about anybody else. His blog was his tool to educate those folks about who he was.

As he says, "Presbyterian 2.0 has been seriously unleashed." _
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02:39:56 PM, Sunday 22 June 2008

Two people just walked by our house performing the little musical motif from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. One would whistle the first part, the the other would doot, doot, doot. _
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01:52:34 PM, Sunday 22 June 2008

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

Wow. Just wow. I can't say how true this seems to me, or, based on my daily observations at Pseudo-Ivy, how hard it is at an elite school if you don't fit this paradigm. _
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07:20:26 PM, Wednesday 18 June 2008

I'm glad Barack Obama has gotten so many people interested in politics who never were before, whether due to apathy, ignorance, disaffection, or disenfranchisement. He is rightfully a hero of the African-American community who have long been excluded from our political process. I'm even glad people like Wil Wheaton are voting for the first time in their lives in their mid-thirties or later.

But I'm sick of the assumption that everybody under 40 is like them. I'm sick of the media treating us all as one huge block of people who've never paid attention before and now all support Obama unconditionally. And I'm really sick of those members of my generation lecturing me about politics like I am one of them.

Welcome to the political process. It's frequently very nice here. You can actually feel like you know what's going on: why politicians say certain things, why some people are considered "serious candidates" and others not, why congressional representatives might support what looks like a bad bill or oppose what looks like a good one, how our courts system actually works, how powerful and powerless the executive actually is. When you've invested your heart and soul and time, it can also be very frustrating. And it's always hard work to keep up with what's currently going on and to constantly try to inform yourself about the past in our country and how that affects what's happening now.

If you've just joined the Democratic Party, you should learn about its long sordid history, its role in the early years of the country, its ugly history in the South, states rights, federalism, populism, and progressivism and the conflict between them. And don't forget to learn about its recent history, from that Roosevelt who was a Democrat, through the wars of the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and for that matter, what was actually going on during the Clinton administration and the current one.

In the meantime, I will vote for Obama in the fall, so quit trying to use Roe to extort my vote. It just makes you look like a bully who doesn't understand the history of reproductive rights in this country, the current availability of abortion, or how to graciously convince people that your candidate is the best choice. _
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08:43:28 AM, Sunday 15 June 2008

So we saw The Happening at my insistence. The thing about Shyamalan is he's trying to do his own thing, not adapting books, not doing remakes or sequels. And he's also trying to be Hitchcock. I have a lot of respect for both of those endeavors.

I mostly go to the movies to be entertained--I like visual creativity, I like good dialogue and acting, I like to be kept guessing-- and even when his movies pretty much suck (as in Signs) they're still entertaining. The Happening is better than Signs. _
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05:25:39 PM, Saturday 14 June 2008

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally. While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

In other words, those nutty feminists who discourage conforming to socially constructed gender roles were right. _
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08:04:52 AM, Saturday 14 June 2008

Mac user question: If you use Windows in Parallels most of the time, do you also have the option to boot fully into Windows using Bootcamp built into Leopard? Or are they completely different implementations (partitions?) of Windows? Most things I need to occasionally run in Windows (Access and HEC-RAS) should work fine in Parallels but from time to time I'll be using GIS which is a memory and processor hog and would have to be run by booting into Windows. _
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09:57:08 AM, Friday 13 June 2008

We're getting a lot of smoke from this fire. It's fairly unpleasant just to go outside. _
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09:20:40 AM, Friday 13 June 2008

Got a couple days worth of Utah pictures up. A couple more days worth to go. _
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07:46:47 PM, Thursday 12 June 2008

FEMA recently announced that from now on ice in emergencies will be considered a "comfort item" and will only be provided in the case of individual medical conditions. (For those who have never survived a hurricane or tropical storm or such, when you lose power in hot weather, ice is a necessity.) In response, Congressman Gene Taylor, who represents the MIssissippi Gulf Coast, referred to FEMA as "a bunch of buttheads". _
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05:01:13 PM, Wednesday 11 June 2008

Guess who gets blood tests for the most likely conditions based on her symptoms? Me!

None of these things are things one hopes one has, but at this point a diagnosis means the possibility of treatment beyond NSAIDs and muscle relaxers and that is hopeful, in a way. Also, the devil you know beats the devil you don't and all that jazz.

Although Dr. Sympathetic sent me back to Dr. Sports Medicine on the grounds that he knows more about joints than she does, she apparently gave him a little talking to about over-emphasizing the psychological possibilities without having really eliminated physical causes at all. Towards the end of the appointment, he quickly asked "How are other things in your life? Are you sad or anxious?" and I was able to tell him about my great vacation hiking around in the desert taking pictures of rocks. Apparently, that is not typical behavior of depressed people, because he didn't keep going in that direction.

One other good thing about sticking to Student Health right now is they know that they are not the world expert on X and so they're willing to look things up and ask other people questions and maybe just run a test even though it might be inconclusive, because it could also be conclusive. I think once you're the world expert on something it's easy to dismiss anything that doesn't directly match that thing you're the expert on as not worth your time. Academic curiosity might not extend to the practitioners at a teaching hospital. _
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04:02:42 PM, Wednesday 11 June 2008

Myths: Feminists look for stuff to get mad about and Sexism is a matter of opinion

You may be the nicest person in the world according to everybody you know, but if you say a sexist thing you should be called out. Not thinking it was sexist, not meaning anything sexist, having a "good intent" does not prevent what you said from being sexist. Overt, intentional sexists are hard to educate or change. They certainly aren't interested in what women have to say. But even our allies, and feminists ourselves, have been steeped in this culture and need to be aware of their own unconscious sexism. Pointing out you said a sexist thing, explaining how it was sexist, (if your point was good) talking about how you could have said the same thing without sexism: these are not mean or petty or vindictive acts; they are simply the only way we will ever eliminate the sexism that permeates our society. _
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06:31:51 AM, Tuesday 10 June 2008

White valedictorian at Morehouse College I find this fascinating on several levels. Josh Packwood clearly values Morehouse in every way, both in its history as an HBCU and the quality of education in provides. The fact that it's making the national news shows that we're a long way from the whole country recognizing those values. _
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06:23:38 PM, Monday 9 June 2008

The high today is 100F. My streams are starting to dry up. Again. _
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10:33:56 AM, Saturday 7 June 2008

If we want to end the great moral shame of America � the 37 million Americans who are denied economic justice in our country � then we need to ask the most basic question: why? Not why are "they" struggling every day, but why do we accept things as they are? _
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09:28:53 PM, Friday 6 June 2008

Progressives need to wake up and realize they're being played and refuse to buy into toxic crap that they should not, must not, be about. At some point we need to stand back and take stock and realize that damage has been done and it needs repairing, both for the short and the long term. _
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02:11:30 PM, Friday 6 June 2008

More to come... _
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11:52:47 PM, Tuesday 3 June 2008

My friend Brooke is running a 5K right now in my place. She's doing that because in January it never occurred to me I would be unable to run a 5K in May. It also never occurred to me I would be flummoxed over and over again by a flight of stairs separating two sets of meeting rooms.

The building our meeting is in is no doubt fully ADA compliant. There are elevators and ramps. They are not always so conveniently located, but they exist. I don't jump between sessions as much, because of the flight of stairs and the wait for the elevator. Several folks I don't know have made little comments about me taking the elevator, comments I once would have made, about how ecologists ought to be in good enough shape to use the stairs. Twice, the free food has run out while I was waiting for the elevator and then slowly walking from one end of the building to the other where food was being served. Without free food, it's several blocks walk to a restaurant, then several blocks walk back to the convention center.

Whatever this is, it's given me another teaspoon's worth of awareness of the privilege I was born with. _
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07:18:53 PM, Tuesday 27 May 2008

Medical establishment hate again. That is all. _
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01:07:44 PM, Wednesday 21 May 2008

Getting ready for my conference in Salt Lake City followed by vacation in Moab, I am a little confused to find the weather there not that different from here, right down to the rain. I know that the air will be drier between storms than it is here (current humidity in Moab: 15%, in Durham: 93%), but still I guess I need to revise my thinking about what the Southwest is like in May. _
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06:55:20 AM, Wednesday 21 May 2008

There comes a time in every election when the writing is on the wall. A candidate has tried everything, made every move and pandered to every group and it's still not going to happen. It becomes obvious to everyone from the serious political pundits to the person on the street. It's time to drop out.

For John McCain, that time is now. _
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07:44:26 AM, Tuesday 20 May 2008

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