I anticipate feeling short on cash and craving a financial windfall, once our projects fund bleeds the rest of itself away and the new kitchen has to sit on its duff until our savings account again blossoms, which often is slow to happen because we prioritize being at home over excessive work opportunities.
These PSAs shown on the news channel students sometimes watch at school help me keep my pining in humorous check:
But these things do sometimes happen:
The Economist noted recently that increased American vehicle fuel efficiency and less driving is leaving highways without fuel-tax-generated funding, thereby preventing roadways from being improved.
And things do need untroubling. As the article states, “The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2009 that 36% of America’s major urban highways are congested, costing $78.2 billion each year in wasted time and fuel costs.”
But oh, what good news! The silver lining to road unimprovement is that the fuel purchased for wasting in urban highway congestion will fund infrastructure betterment that will, in the long run….oh, shucks, never mind.
N has been waking up in the middle of the night and calling for me to take her to the bathroom. Often she walks in a sleepy fog to the toilet and sits there for a long time, with me nearby fretting that she’ll fall back to sleep and fall off.
She has over the last couple months learned to snap her fingers, and she’s eager to show off her new skill as well as to use it nonchalantly and at random moments–like while conversing at the dinner table or even when she’s returning to her bedroom in the middle of the night, in her stupor. Last night she just reached that little wrist out, snapped her fingers, turned through her bedroom door, and stumbled into bed.
Winter is coming, of course, making those bathroom trips shivery. But the still-warm days of our season entice flies out of hiding for last forays before winter immobilizes them; I find them when their reticence to return to their hideaways before the cool of night leaves them slowed to a measly grog and they sit dumbfounded until I pick them up only to flush them away forever, I hope.
As the nights trend toward even colder cold, the mice outside are seeking warmer quarters in our scrabbling walls. Eleven mice have bit the cheesy dust already this fall; the first eight were snapped away in the first 48 hours of my eradication campaign.
I even caught one at someone else’s house one afternoon over Thanksgiving. I kept glimpsing movement and then saw it for real, so I grabbed a toy net from the closet and with some help herded it into the blue plastic. I felt rather heroic, like a mighty hunter.
At home, though, my technique is less exciting. In general accordance with expert marketers’ directions, I securely lace old-fashioned wooden traps with small bits of cheese, then place them at key locations where I’ve seen traffic signs in our attic and basement.
I’m no expert, though, at setting the traps. I still get all shaky and clumsy when I place them, which sometimes trips them, which startles me to no end, which means I’m even more shaky when I try again.
But it’s becoming more of a snap all the time.
Hmmm. Not bad ideas, I suppose. Worth…testing, anyway, since they’re scientific and all.
In the meantime, three screams for NPR!
After church this morning, standing around talking with people, I realized I was at the focal point of a half-circle of people.
“How neat!” I thought. “People like me, and want to talk to me and hear what I have to say!”
Only later did I realize that at the time I’d been holding H.
A sampling of Her Cuteness, and the cuteness of her older sister, who maybe feels sometimes like I do:
I confess, I got a little teary when I watched this the first several times (my student teacher used it in classes):
Actually, it even made me miss Michael Jackson, a little, so after the girls went to bed, M and I watched a few of his music videos. It was quite an education for us, as neither of us had paid him much heed before.
We still don’t, really, but this video, at least, has a high coolness factor (especially the very beginning):
I recorded a practice session of M singing and her sister H playing piano; they were preparing for the Sunday morning offertory at their parents’ church:
Notable to me in the eight-minutes-plus flick (below) of the pepper spray incident at UC Davis was the protesters’ restraint in the face of the campus police force’s shameful and cruel use of the spray. It wasn’t clear to me why those police–at least one of whom appeared relaxed and even cheerful–had to move those sitting students; a few of the sprayed students stumbled away while others stayed put and were arrested and the camera-happy crowd around them chanted to the police, “Shame on you!” Eventually the police rallied to themselves and slowly retreated to the victorious cheers of the students.
At first viewing I felt largely unsympathetic to the protesters, whose victory shouts of “it’s our campus” seemed largely irrelevant. Even without that silly framing of the “victory,” what did they think could possibly be gained by sitting in a street in the name of some vague Occupy Wall Street goal that, however magnificent, so quickly proved to be derailable into an–albeit admirably nonviolent, on the protesters’ part–mere push and shove contest with campus police who have no more say about “perceived economic inequality” than the protesters themselves?
In short, it seemed to me a rather trivial and somewhat pointless imitation by spoiled rich kids of the so-called Arab Spring in which protesters risk their lives to confront the powers of oppression, or even of the movement against the School of the Americas in which students don’t risk their lives but still bring their protests to the doorstep of their anticause.
At another glance, however, I had second thoughts about writing off the UC Davis protesters. At minimum, it is a valid and, for our society as a whole, relevant question that a protester shouted at the police: “Who do you protect?” The police are, after all, the front line of societal (mis)priorities; they reveal where the government’s heavy hand drops. To stand up to the police is perhaps the most accessible point against which people can stand up to object to the injustices of our economic system.
At UC Davis, the pepper spraying itself led to an even more remarkable and restrained protest, later on, when the chancellor of the university–there have been calls for her to leave her post–was given a “silent walk of shame” to her car:
