What's a Legislator To Do?

It's sad. State budgets are under huge deficits. Gone, temporarily at least, are the days when a fella could make a bundle - and get his name in the paper and everything - by proposing some expensive piece of legislation or other. (How many buildings and programs are named after Robert C. Byrd?) Yes, legislation was the ticket - spend tax money, build buildings, start programs, go green - or just 'investigate' something by sending friends on overseas vacations (a Nancy Pelosi specialty) or shopping trips. Good times.

Alas.

So what's a legislator to do now? What happens when the only option is to cut, not spend?

In Washington our representatives are hard at work mandating the people to spend 4 hours a year of their employer's work time going to school conferences or events. They are also meeting and drafting drafts and discussing the write-up of requirements for break times for hospital workers. And in California - God bless California - they are voting to make the first week in March 'cuss-free.'

Today's Outing - Whidbey Island

Heavy Lifting and Home Repairs

Our microwave oven stopped working. We were trying to change a burnt-out light bulb and at about the 5th turn of the screwdriver to loosen the light-bulb-covering plate, the whole thing went pop! It died. We have no idea why. We have no idea how to even look for the 'why.' And we reasoned that it would cost less to buy a new one than to have someone come out and look at it.

(I've mentioned before that we aren't very good with home repairs...)

So we bought a new one - which was a long story in itself but not a very interesting one so I'll just skip it - and were left with the problem of taking the old one out and installing the new one. By ourselves. Just us. With written instructions.

Instructions, I might add, that pointedly stated that this was a two-person job. And not to put too fine a point on it, the illustration really indicated that it was a 2-MAN job.

Oh dear.

We managed to reason our way through the instructions pretty well. I was proud of us. But where we always run into problems is in the 'heavy lifting' part. The 2-MAN part.

Mark is strong as an ox. Me, not so much. I have a lot of trouble holding up my end of things - particularly if holding up my end of things involves having a lot of weight on upraised arms for a long time while screws are being applied or something. Definitely not my thing.

We did it though. Mark held up his end and a considerable amount of mine and we were lucky, on the first try, to get the thing placed inside the brackets which mostly held its weight.

But it left me wondering - how do other couples handle this? Does everyone but us have a neighbor or friend readily available to help?

Or are other wives out there less wussy than I?

The Dog Show

We watched the Westminster Dog Show, of course, over the last couple of days. (There is just NOTHING else on, after all!) And I have some questions about 'designer dogs.'

Why do so many dogs these days have their tails on backwards? Isn't a tail an extension of the vertebrae of the back? As such shouldn't the tail extend straight out from the rear of the dog instead of bending forward over the back toward the head? Dozens of dogs had their tails covering their backs instead of waving out behind them. I always considered the tail to be a nod to modesty - covering up what ought to be covered up, as it were. So many of the dogs had - excuse me - their asshole as their most prominent feature, as a result of this unfortunate trend.

There is also an increasing focus on dysfunction. How many dogs are there that can't see for all the hair covering their eyes and can't breathe because of squashed in noses and can't walk because of 'fringe?' That poor 'corded' dog probably hasn't been allowed outside in years for fear he should mess up his coat.

And who could have thought a 'rat tail' would be an attractive feature to encourage on a beautiful dog like the Irish Water Spaniel? That's just bad aesthetics.

We enjoyed it anyway.

Velocity

I was standing in line at the Credit Union today watching their little closed-circuit TV broadcasting ads for their services, stock quotes, local weather and the like - and they put up a 'Factoid' that said:

"According to the Theory of Relativity, mass increases with velocity. In other words, the faster an object travels, the more mass it has."

Really?

In that case, I better start walking slower.



(I know. There are 2 kinds of 'mass: "relativistic mass" (mv) and "invariant mass" (m0.) The invariant mass of a particle is independent of its velocity v, whereas relativistic mass increases with velocity and tends to infinity as the velocity approaches the speed of light c. But that isn't what the folks at the credit union were saying!)

A little bit of History

While in Arizona I worked on redoing the scrapbook my mother had put together in the 40's for my father to chronicle his WWII career in the Army Air Corp - disintegrated after all these years (the book, not the Air Corp.) He had sent her pictures, sometimes annotated on the back, lists of names and addresses of friends he had made, and all manner of memorabilia providing insight not only to his own experience but to the state of the country and the war effort in general. It was fascinating.

There were so many pictures that one wondered if one of the booming industries at the time wouldn't have had to be photo supplies and developing. Or that these guys didn't have anything better to do than take pictures of each other.

It was also a cockeyed look at the way the military worked. He enlisted 'for the duration' and was in the Army Air Corp for 3 years - all of which was spent in the US getting ready to go to war. He attended radio school and gunnery school, took classes at the University of Vermont for over a year, was sent to air cadet school and then back to radio school and finally assigned to a B-29 bomber unit to start training flights as part of a bomber crew. They did 'over sea' training for bombing missions by flying to Cuba and back, once - a two day trip - and that trip ultimately constituted his overseas assignment and meant that he was discharged right at the end of the war instead of having to serve in some 'occupation' capacity at the end. For all of that, his bomber crew was on the runway, taking off for the Pacific war theater for their very first combat assignment, when the end of the war was announced and they were told to turn around and come back. Literally ON the runway - poised to go. It was evidently a near disaster getting the plane to recover from an almost-aborted take-off. What a career!

For all the grandkids: There is a picture of him in a pilot's getup that he labeled on the back as "H.P. Stouffer," indicating that H.P. stood for Hot Pilot. (Who knew they were 'hot' even then?) He was in pilot training - had several solo flights (if the 'flight clearance' slips, signed and dated and included in the scrapbook, are any indication) but 'washed out' of training when he got a little too cocky and buzzed a beach where, presumably, some irate Colonel was trying to have a relaxing morning with his family and took offence. That the Army invested 3 years of training into him only to drum him out of the program for a little too much enthusiasm and confidence is just sad. But I can believe it. Anyway, the fun thing is thinking about him actually BEING that young and cocky. He would have been all of 21 years old??

So there they were - the B-29 bomber crew - on their big training flight to Cuba. Their destination was the Batista Army Airfield in La Habana Province, about 30 miles southwest of Havana. Having successfully navigated there and landed, they did what, evidently, every bomber training crew did - headed to Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana. And there is my father - in the back row, last one on the right - looking not at all pleased to be having his picture taken in a bar.

(He was, of course, a lifelong teetotaler. And a non-smoker, although his tobacco ration card was well punched. He must have been very popular with the rest of his crew.)

There is a list of the crew included, with everyone identified as to their position in the crew. My father wrote to the pilot years later - we found the letters in his computer files - and must have gotten a response.

There were pay envelopes in the scrapbook - a soldier's pay was $70 a month - some of which to be sent home to family. Some of which also seemed to have gone to laundry and recreation etc. There were train schedules and 'permission to be absent from base' slips - all carefully typed or handwritten. There was even a final exam - 3 pages, legal sized, all typed on a typewriter! Ma Bell evidently handed out postcards to servicemen who had been unable to make a long distance phone call, telling their loved ones that they had tried but failed to get through. The post cards had an explanation on the back indicating that copper was being used for the war effort and so was unavailable for the purpose of putting up new telephone wire. And from every posting there was a published handbook of instructions and helpful hints for succeeding - from directions to the mess hall and admonishments to salute anything that moves, to reminders that they should go to church on Sunday and keep their shoes clean and write home and act honorably.

There were also a bunch of disciplinary slips in the book - with his name written on them in his own handwriting, but with nothing filled in for 'date,' 'infraction' or 'punishment.' Do you suppose they had to carry a bunch of blanks around in their pockets in case some officer noted some offence and told them to put themselves on report?

(I am writing this from memory - someone please correct me if I have any of the details wrong, which I tend to do!)

Here's an interesting thing - we found, on the internet, other pictures, just like his, of crews in Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana Cuba. Follow the link for more...


And: The airfield from above on Bing Maps.

We're back

Back from our little road trip. Actually it wasn't very little, I guess - about 3200 miles and over 50 hours of driving. I have fanny fatigue.

It actually rained in Tucson while we were there - and when we left. A desert rain is a wonderful thing and I'm glad we got to see it. Actually, I'm mostly glad we got to smell it.

We hiked in Redington Pass, shopped and lunched in Tubac, took a few pictures of Mission San Xavier del Bac, looked at stars at Catalina State Park and generally ate our way through various old favorites in town (steaks at Pinnacle Peak and chicken at Lucky Wishbone and fries and milkshakes at In 'N Out Burger - actually a holdover from our years in California - as well as a sundae at Swenson's and the lobster queso dip at Firebirds... good grief, we really DID eat our way through town!)

Daisy the dog loved visiting Frik and Maddie the cats - confined as they were to the guest room, they had to be visited periodically when someone opened the door and let Daisy in. Somehow Daisy just knows that you find cats under beds, and in spite of them sitting right on top of the bed when the door opened, she looked right past them and stuck her nose under the bed every time. Where are they?

For their part, Frik and Maddie didn't fully appreciate the trip although by the end they were being brave enough to come out of their carriers and shed hair all over the car.

We drove down via California and ran into so many aggressively stupid drivers that we returned via Utah/Idaho. That made for an interesting trip because of the snow.

Incidentally, if you want to drive over Hoover Dam in Northern Arizona, you better do it quickly. They are building a bridge over the dam and rerouting traffic entirely. By the 'security' details there they seem to think it at risk of a terrorist attack. (I put 'security' in quotes because it was the sort of security that responds to the popular political notion that Americans want to 'feel' safe, rather than than to the perhaps more accurate concept that Americans - and everyone else - want to actually BE safe. 'Being' safe is probably not an attainable goal but with a whole lot of trampling on our rights 'feeling' safe is a good substitute with obvious 'up' sides for the ruling elite. But I digress.)

So, while I collect my thoughts about various things I thought I'd write about, there are pictures to post, of course!