Monday, January 31, 2005
Teething sucks.
Just sayin’.
Carnival of the Capitalists
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Ashish’s Niti. There was impressive turnout!
Next week’s edition will be hosted at Catallarchy. As always, send your entries to cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com, or use the gongol.com form.
Happy Blogiversary
Congratulations to James Joyner on two great years of Outside the Beltway.
Carnival of the Capitalists Mailing List
For anyone who might be interested, the former announcement lists for Carnival of the Capitalists have been merged.
Hosts was on the Mailman list manager of elhide.com’s hosting, and was for “once and future hosts” to get announcements when CotC was up, and sometimes discuss ideas for CotC.
CC was a list hosted in my office, which anyone could subscribe via e-mail, for announcements when each week’s CotC had been published. It was by far the bigger list.
The two have been merged into a list named CotC, hosted on elhide.com using the Mailman list service.
To subscribe you can go to:
http://elhide.com/mailman/listinfo/cotc_elhide.com
That’s also the place to log on an change your options.
This information is also being published as an update to the Carnival of the Capitalists page.
Your Daily Sadie
Sunday, January 30, 2005
More Carnival-y Goodness
Quietness
Sorry for the lack of blogging today. The cold that hit me abruptly the other night and felt like an intense yet short-lived one has knocked me on my ass. I just spent the afternoon in bed, sleeping off and on and trying to be warm. It’s most annoying. The fact that I have a doctor’s appointment lined up Tuesday afternoon (all three of us are scheduled back to back) may be fortuitous timing.
I have waaaay too much to do to be sick like this. The only good thing is when I am up for at least getting to the computer, I can work on the beta of the new web site for my big client, which is a major project and will be done entirely from home anyway, except for meeting with the designer in person. I think she may have been the one to give me the cold. If she brought a novel variant from a couple hours away, that would explain why it hit so hard.
Anyway, I may or may not post much in the next day or two, depending on how I feel and what strikes my fancy. This at least explains why. Many other blogs are covering or rounding up coverage of Iraq today better than I’d ever dream of doing, so not like you’ll miss out on the big happenings of the day.
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
On this glorious day for freedom, you might also want to take a few moments to check out the latest Carnival of the Recipes, making its appearance a couple days late this week.
Next week’s will be at The Glittering Eye.
Frightening Frist.
There’s been some talk that Bill Frist might make a suitable Presidential candidate. Medpundit has provided me with another very good reason to reject him out of hand: his nightmare vision of the future of healthcare. Creepy.
Your Daily Sadie
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Hey Kid, Do You Know What Day It Is?
I knew it was coming, then forgot it until now. Today Sadie is four months old! Seems like she’s been with us forever already. At the convention last weekend that was always the first question, and we’d reply in unison “almost four months.” Over and over and over again. I joked that she needed a pin or sign, or we did, saying her name and age.
So she’s already been teething for two months. She’s dying to eat real food (apart from her little tastes of ice cream, frosting, and ketchup so far), which is likely to start next week after her 4 month checkup Tuesday. All three of us have appointments the same day. She’s about to get weaned into her crib. she already clashes with her mother and favors her father, having not learned yet that I’ll probably be the tougher parent. She’s obviously strong-willed, but there’s no way she can out-stubborn either of us.
Today she seems to have forgotten how to roll from front to back, but automatically rolls to her front when she’s on her back. Almost got herself flipped in the bassinet where we change her. She loves the water still, but seems completely aware that her face should not get below the surface and reacts accordingly if it’s close. She can almost hold herself up to sit, but doesn’t quite have the balance and control yet. Only needs a bare minimum of support. She’s well on her way to throwing good temper tantrums when frustrated or not getting her way.
Her current thing is not wanting to sleep. Just in recent days, she’s sleeping less and falling asleep reluctantly. It’s as if she’s afraid of missing anything. We hope this passes very quickly!
Go Sadie! You’re a third of the way through that important first year you’ll never remember but which is being rather well documented.
Baleful Red Glare of Rockets Can’t Stop Elections
Steven Taylor is reporting that the U.S. embassy in Iraq has been attacked with rockets. He got the news before it was being reported in most MSM outlets, and is continuing to update as the news becomes more widespread and detailed.
Joan of Arcadia
I saw most of Joan of Arcadia last night, after having missed the previous couple of episodes. Trouble was, at about quarter of nine Sadie needed changing. When I got back, I came in on the end of the encounter in Lucy’s office.
I gather that he got enough of a handle on her corruption, which I have assumed to exist in some form since she was introduced, to confront her. Either that, or she knew what he was doing and confronted him. Made it kind of a cliffhanger, since it sounded like he was fired to me. Anyway, I knew she was bad news. Too smarmy, too obviously manipulative, and too unlikely as the person to have suddenly been thrust into the position of police chief after the last bit of police wrongdoing was uncovered.
Apparently I missed how he started to be suspicious of her. It seems to be related to his investigation of Judith’s murder, and the impression I got is that she was involved in protecting the killer, if not more directly still. Usually I find the Dad and cop parts less interesting than the Joan parts, but I’m intrigued to see what happens.
Your Daily Sadie
Friday, January 28, 2005
Bonus Sadie
I didn’t notice what she had just done when I snapped this…
It’s Official
As of today, Sadie is able to roll both back to front and front to back essentially at will, and is capable of rolling herself across the floor that way. Go Sadie!
And watch out parents. Yikes!
Brain Sharing: Operational
Scary, isn’t it? Yesterday morning, I thought to myself it would be great to have one of the cranberry pies, this time made with apples I’d bought to try as an alternate recipe. That way I could have it for breakfasts. At the time we were out of milk and had no bagels, which we’ve cut back on. I generally want no more than a quick something of that size.
I came home to a fresh new cranberry pie style apple “pie” and was all excited. Turned out that Deb got up and had exactly the same thought.
Today I was in the kitchen, remembering we had some cheap steak ($1.79 lb London broil on sale) to eat for supper, and was thinking we ought to make the Jedi Mom’s recipe for flour tortillas. What we do is cook the steak, cut it into strips, and put them in burrito wrappers with cheese, sour cream, and depending what we have or want, some combo of lettuce, tomato, refried beans, salsa, or rice. Rice we generally have on the side, anyway. We lack the lettuce and tomato today, so they’ll have to be simple. Anyway, we’ve been meaning to try the recipe, as the store bought ones are great, but expensive. Plus it becomes a recipe to post, once it’s been test driven.
As I was thinking about that, Deb walked into the kitchen and said “I think we should make the burrito wrappers.”
This kind of thing happens pretty much constantly. It’s pretty cool, when it’s not freaking us out.
New Blog, Old Blogger
The excellent blogger formerly known as Mapchic is part of a new group blog she put together with friends. It’s called Amendment XIX, and she described it to me as:
Our vision for the blog is to be a sort of bastard child of Powerlineblog (conservative group blog) and the TV show “The View” a group of women from varied backgrounds discussing issues.
This will go on our blogroll when it gets updated, and you may also find it worth investigating. Or not. But hey, check it out and see how it goes as they get rolling.
Here’s one for the Fresno types in the audience…
Jerry Tarkanian’s wife is now a city council member in Las Vegas.
My goodness.
Let Time Not Be All That Flies
Caltechgirl just made me feel old, as well as very sad. Has it really been 19 years? Wow. Yet only 38 yesterday for Apollo 1. How far we came in those first 19 years. Well, the first handful, anyway. How mired we’ve been these last 19.
I am hopeful. Ecstatic, even, at the recent progress and moves being made in the private world of business toward viable, practical, flexible, long-term solutions to the shortage of “soup bowls” and the lapse of will to catch the universe’s rain of bounty.
It’s exciting, but no less sad so many won’t be with us to see it. Still, the biggest obstacle even the privateers face is making space transport, habitation and work too costly in money because we refuse to expend lives on risk anymore. As humans have traditionally done so freely to get us where we are.
The Dangling Prepositions And The Superficial Spellers
This discussion of Jen’s roommate’s daughter’s laziness about learning or figuring out spellings, and the resulting comment thread, reminds me of when I took German in college.
My approach was to learn that certain combinations made certain sounds, making it easier to pronounce an unknown word, or guess the spelling of a heard but unseen word. For instance, ei rhymes with eye and ie rhymes with knee. Which gets me in trouble when I see a surname like Wein and find out the name’s owner pronounces it “wrong.”
A couple of the other students thought I was nuts, and that the way to go was to memorize the spelling and pronounciation of each individual word, one by one. Ugh. Lucky for them the professor never made us learn much vocabulary, which I consider perhaps his greatest failing.
To me English is similar; certain rules and commonalities, plus exceptions to be learned as you go along. Yet even some of the exceptions have reasons, rules or patterns to help remember them. All of which is why exposure to a foreign language or two (well, some of them anyway) is wonderful for getting a better grip on English, even if you never learn the other language usably.
As for dangling prepositions, which we all learned were evil, yet find difficult to avoid in many cases, I seem to recall having read that the rule was never a real one, but rather contrived and pushed by some individual centuries back. If so, it’s quite a success story at spreading unearned guilt among users of the language.
Electric Torture
I’m already feeling a little better, after laying back down, getting warmish, and snoring at Deb for about an hour. Now to see if the coffee will help even more.
Meanwhile, I forgot part of what I was going to say in my shaving post, so I’ll continue it here.
Electric razors.
My father swears by them. I’ve tried out some but never long enough to get past the fact that they seem intended more as torture devices for yanking painfully on facial hair than as something useful. I certainly wasn’t ever going to shell out money for extended massochism that might or might not ever subside and be replaced with the desired results.
Anyone else out there dislike electrics as much as I do? Anyone want to come to their defense?
What’s Up With That?
I started out yesterday in perfect health. Rather abruptly last night I came down sick, with a leaky nose and scratchy throat. Everyone else here is fine, whereas last time Sadie was sick for days before Deb got it, then I was last but hit hardest. I must have picked it up at work yesterday, but nobody was overtly sick.
All I want to do is curl up in some blankets and be warm, even if there is no sleep involved. But even if I postpone what I had planned for work today, trying to get VPN enabled on a client’s server so an injured attorney can work from home, I still have to go to BJ’s for a load of stuff. Which could wait, except we need diapers. A $30 box of them there, now that she’s on a size that will stay the same a while, is convenient and saves a lot of money. We’re due for wipes there, too. Which leaves about $50 or so available for the balance of what really needs to be a nearly $200 stock back up run. Oh well.
Ugh. I think it’s time to curl up for a while, before I do anything.
Dear Shaw’s Supermarket
I went to Roche Brothers again last night. You know; your competition? Yeah, them. The fantastic new one in Easton, close enough to at least four of your stores to be competition with those in particular.
I went there last time I shopped, too. Heh. That trip, not only did they charge me the correct prices on everything, they even made a 22 cent mistake in my favor. And I didn’t even need a card to shop and get the sale prices! How cool is that.
Oh Shaw’s, once upon a time, you were the best. You were the “not Stop & Shop” store. You were the pioneer of computerization and scanning registers tied to inventory. You gave my college money for the management science department to buy computers, after their marketing students did a big study for you as part of their course work. You were always the low prices, not the frills, just plain good.
Now? After a long stretch of time in which I’ve observed you trying to be Stop & Shop, raising your prices, getting obsessive about store brands, adopting that assinine card program that most customers hate, there’s nothing special about you anymore. Unless you are trying to be special by overcharging me.
See, I didn’t take seriously the word out there that each register tape needs to be examined for errors, and much of the time one can be found. But recently there was a cash flow crunch, so I knew exactly what the price of each item had been labeled at the shelf, and what the total ought to be. Two visits in a row you let me down, overcharging. It’s downright vile to buy something you would never buy but for the labeled sale price, only to get home and find it was charged at full price. Hey Shaw’s, tear down those sale signs! If you don’t mean them, take them down, stop misleading people.
Roche Brothers is a ritzy store. They don’t pretend otherwise. Their employees routinely help customers load groceries in their cars and retrieve the carts before they can litter the parking lot. One end of the store is practically a restaurant, the way they specialize in prepared food that I can’t afford and seldom buy, but which is excellent. They are well staffed, well stocked, well price labeled, friendly, helpful, clean… and they are in it to compete with you by having excellent sales. But you knew that; I can tell by comparing the sale fliers.
Guess what! They actually charge the sale prices when things are on sale. Always. It’s not a game of pricing roulette.
Your store is walking distance. Their store is a few miles away. After the last couple visits, your store doesn’t even get proximity preference anymore. That’s pretty sad, for a store that has been my primary grocer for as long as I have been buying groceries. When I lived nowhere near a Shaw’s and Stop & Shop was amazingly the best of three competitors, I used to drive my friends crazy: Shaw’s this, Shaw’s that; it’s a dollar less at Shaw’s, yada yada. They had to insist I stop the wistful price comparisons.
I can only hope that Albertson’s will straighten you out as they take over. Save you from yourselves, as it were.
Your Daily Sadie
This is Sadie with her new rag doll from one of the dealers at Arisia. It is authentic Viking style, except instead of rocks the head is filled with cloth. She just loves it. We got her another one, multi-colored, in the other style, where the legs are all braided and it looks octopus-like. What the heck; they were $6 each or two for $10.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Poor Sinuses
And in “favorite things to breathe for any length of time” we have whiteboard cleaner. You’d be surprised how much it took me to clean year old blue writing off of a 4x8’ whiteboard a little while ago. Especially since the stuff makes up for its pungence by being amazingly effective.
The olfactory assault (heck, battery too) leads me to think it’s time to go now. Nothing here that can’t wait for tomorrow…
Somebody has quite the sense of humor.
...giving mothers only two hands.
Ha, ha! Very funny, Big Guy! 
Busy here, so no deep thoughts from me. The baby is now bored with rolling over for the day, so I’m off to figure out a new game. A rousing round of peek-a-boo, perhaps?
You know, I have a lot of trouble posting sometimes because I still haven’t figured out to let go of my own agenda, how to adopt the little one’s rhythm, how to think and write in the pauses she gives me. I’m working on it, but I haven’t been in someone else’s groove before, and I find it startling in its difficulty.
More Boston Pictures
Some of these will seem a bit Warholian, but what the heck. These are some more views from the 15th floor of the Park Plaza, where we stayed for Arisia, and beyond, last weekend, coinciding with the blizzard.
There are five, shown chronologically, that are at an angle in the direction of the statehouse. One in particular is great for showing what happened to visibility in the storm. One or two of those
are from a very small number of shots in which I experimented with zooming. I didn’t expect it to work very well.
The next two show the building across the street, but pointing down toward a large balcony/rooftop area created by the building not being the same height everywhere, It also shows part of Arlington Street.
Finally, one as straight down as I could manage, focusing on the street early in the storm. Guys down there started scraping the snow away immediately and apparently kept at it all night. The last one points down the street at an angle to the right. These give a good idea how far up we were.
Anyway, here we go, a post that’s the bane of dialup users and folks who dislike photoblogging…
Fear of Man
This article, via Glenn, doesn’t surprise me. I am on a mailing list that includes the “Killer B’s”: Benford, Brin, and Bear. It’s on encouraging kids to read, and learn to read, through science fiction, which often is what will get an otherwise bored-with-reading kid hooked. There’s a lot of discussion of teaching ideas and so forth.
Lately it has also included bashing on Michael Crichton over being “anti-science,” not merely with State of Fear (which I have not yet read far, but is intriguing for the first few chapters that set things up), but in general.
Not that I would be surprised if some of the facts cited in Crichton’s book are debatable, but even if not a bonfire of delusion fed by power grabbing conspirators, that we are that responsible for climate change is a pretty haughty assumption for humans to make, given what Mr. Sun can do to climate simply by having a hyperactive billionth or so of a solar lifespan.
UPDATE: Added to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
Your Daily Sadie
