And off on another tangent...

I really got off the subject of current events. Since I got a little slide viewer for Christmas, I had the chance to go through old slide film that I had - photos that I took on trips in the 80's - and had some of them 'digitized' again so I could look at them and print them. Great fun.

So here are 2 from a trip into the interior of Alaska:


Look closely above the mountaintops and poking out just above the lowest clouds. It is Denali. The Great One. (Mt McKinley, if you must.) Not often seen, actually. We were lucky.



And this is, I think, Portage Glacier.

What would I actually do with myself if I didn't have these odd little projects to distract me from winter?

The question of the day

Mark has been receiving a lot of emails lately with the subject line 'Are you still working?' from, mostly, former co-workers.

It appears that many of them are not.

(We are feeling lucky. Or at least I am. Mark is always pretty confident that he's going to land on his feet. But I am the closet pessimist, and these are hard times.)

The contact is because people are networking in an effort to secure another job - and it is an interesting process - but it makes me feel like things are really getting bad.

The news is full of stories about layoffs - how many jobs are being eliminated by which big companies. (Microsoft appears to have laid off only American workers - their operations in other countries are all intact.) I think the announcements are mainly to try to convince shareholders that they are going to get a better deal with the company paring down on costs. And from experience with this in the past I know that a fair portion of the jobs being eliminated are jobs that are 'on the books' but not currently filled. You never get that in the news reports though. It's just not sensational enough. Like the foreclosure rate never being quoted in the context of how many mortgages are out there being successfully discharged.

Honestly MY question of the day isn't 'are you still working' but rather this:

How ARE you?

Too good to miss

My friend Stephanie passed on an email that contained comics from the Maxine series - and they were hilarious. But at the bottom of the email, and not attributed to anyone, were three more 'observations' that I thought were priceless. Without being able to state who wrote them, I hope I am not violating anyone's copywrite ownership by restating them here. They are too good to miss:

C O W S
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.

T H E C O N S T I T U T I O N
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq .... Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.

T H E 1 0 C O M M A N D M E N T S
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this: You cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal,' 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,' and 'Thou Shall Not Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians...It creates a hostile work environment.

EFS

After reading today's news I've come to realize that I have EFS. Yes, a new 'condition' identified in a recent study, EFS or 'external food sensitivity' is a condition that influences people's eating habits. Researchers were, evidently, surprised to find that people react to the sight of appetizing food by wanting to eat it (and here's the really surprising result:) EVEN when they aren't actually hungry.

Imagine.

I bet advertisers would like to have that information. Oh wait - they already knew that! (In fact, I wonder how anyone didn't already know that?)

The information I'd REALLY like to have is who paid, and how much, to explore this 'unexpected' idea with actual research?

You may also be interested in knowing that the number of obese American adults now outweighs the number who are merely overweight. That appears to be a direct result of the constant shifting of the definition of 'obese' but that's OK. Funding for someone, somewhere, will come from this new reality also.

Dealing with a lot of stuff here...

My brother emailed me today to see if I was still alive. He'd been checking my blog and found that the last entry about pestilence was, well, still the last entry. He wondered if pestilence was really the reason I hadn't posted anything in a while.

No, I'm just dealing with a lot of stuff here...

My last prescription order got messed up and I had to worry about it and spend a bunch of time dreading calling about it, and then rechecking to make sure that it had, indeed, been messed up, and then complaining about it for a while. The last remaining uncut pumpkin on the back porch started to rot with the freezing weather and I have spent a bunch of time planning how to get rid of it and wondering whether it will be Mark or me who caves in first about it and actually goes out in the cold to shovel it off. That took a bunch of time... And then the water bill came and was way higher than it should have been so a great deal of effort had to be made about leaving messages for the lady who is in charge of water bill questions and another great deal of time had to be spent composing, in my mind, increasingly sarcastic additional messages to leave on her voice mail because she still hasn't called me back ("Leaving a message is much less satisfying than you might think when experience tells you there should be no expectation of actually receiving a response to your message...") even though I was never actually going to leave them.

Frik threw up on the bed three times in the last week so much laundry activity has been necessary. Mark and I can't get up the courage to tackle the grocery shopping (loathsome chore) so another huge block of time has been consumed staring into the open freezer wondering how I can make dinner out of old hot dog buns and frozen applesauce. Another block has been invested in rolling through TV channels in utter disbelief that we can pay this much for cable and still not find anything on that we could possibly watch. (The corollary to that is, of course, the amount of time invested in watching crap.) And that leads to another time sink - searching the internet to find out why all the things I think I'd LIKE to watch aren't on any more.

I've spent more time wringing my hands over why I am slacking off so much on housekeeping lately than I've spent actually doing housekeeping. Another big chunk of time has gone to sitting in traffic jams caused by road repair crews. And still more time has gone to making up excuses about why I don't really need to go anywhere so that I can stay out of traffic jams. A lot of time goes into powering up my computer to check for email that no one ever sends me and even more time goes into looking through junk mail because there isn't any GOOD mail.

I guess I've just been too busy to write. I'm sure you understand.

Is pestilence next or is it locust swarms?

I hardly know what to say. That a black cloud seems to be hanging over my head is clear - though when it will go away is anything but. After being stranded in snow we are now stranded by flood waters. Record flood waters.

I was SO happy to get back to work on Monday - back to a normal life with a routine and everything! And then the rain started. When I left work yesterday afternoon the traffic cameras pointing to the road across the valley showed some water standing in the fields but clearly the road was open. By the time I got to the valley 20 minutes later there was water over the roadway and I had to go around to the other bridge. By the end of the day that road was closed as well. So here we are, waiting for the next plague... hoping our power stays on but knowing that the main power line into the whole community is sagging down into 10 feet of water and it's only a matter of time before it snaps...

Very depressing.

Anyway, here's the road (and the power line):

And here's the community message on our cable channel:

Lovely, huh?