Biking

Today in class we were supposed to write down the factors that were barriers or benefits we felt directed whether we walked, bicycled, carpooled, used public transportation, or drove.  When I stopped to think about it, my feelings about bicycling kind of made me laugh.

To put this in perspective, Bonnie Jean and I owned a car when we got married but didn't really feel we could afford it so we sold the car as soon as we could.  I ran all the errands for almost the entire time bicycling a week of purchases on my back every week.  The weight could become so intense I'd get headaches from supporting it on my shoulders and Bonnie Jean insisted I purchase a set of saddle bags which I was very grateful to own once I had them.  I would bike when it was sunny, when it was rainy, or even if it was snowing.  About the only time I didn't bike is if the roads were one solid layer of ice.  We would rent or borrow a car occasionally for out of town trips and special occasions, but only rarely.  Even with the saddle bags my grocery trips would become so extreme I'd often get comments on the way out of the store as I might have two saddle bags weighed down with heavy liquids like milk, cereals and other light objects filling a large backpack, fruit/bread and other delicate dangling from loops tied to the back pack on the back and shoulders, a frozen pizza wedged behind my back and the backpack, and maybe one or two bags hanging over the handle bars for good measure.  We were avoiding about a 150$ a month for the car payment, 150$ a month insurance payment, and 30$ a month in gas by living this way.  All in all that's 3960$ a year.  It contributed greatly to our ability to begin saving and investing money when we were making very little.  It was the only form of exercise I had but I made good use of it commuting to work, school, and running errands.  At my height of strength during the summer I was such a speedy cyclist I once left the front door of my apartment at the same time as one of my coworkers and beat them to work even though our route included a 50 mph highway.  Granted, I did some crazy stuff to do that like cutting through empty parking lots to avoid stop signs and honing my traffic pattern to avoid having to stop at as many stop lights.  While I walked into work I called out to my coworker, only then exiting her car, that she should go get a bicycle if she was in a hurry to go to work since I beat her there.  I only tried that once, I had such a bad asthma attack from the exertion that I couldn't talk properly.  I think my boss thought I was crazy.

Was I crazy?  In many people's eye's yes I was being completely crazy.  I was living married life with no car in a town with bad winter snowstorms and minimal public transportation.  We only bought a car when we were supposed to get temporary custody of my nephew because I couldn't imagine any way I could bike home a giant box of diapers along with what I was already trucking around town.

Now my biking isn't any where near as extreme as it used to be.  When it snows I drive.  Bonnie Jean does the errands in the car or by bus and I mostly bike the work and school.  The car is ours free and clear, our emergency savings goal of having all our insurance deductibles and three months of living expenses saved up is 50% funded, we have an investment portfolio far beyond what most people my age or at my income level could manage, and considering everything the student debt I have is growing a lot slower than it might because I'm using the tuition reimbursement program at work to pay myself back the large majority of those loans.  A part of this foundation was built by my asthmatic lungs puffed me along 50 miles per week by bicycle trying to avoid higher living expenses anywhere we could by visiting sometimes 2-3 stores per week searching out the best deals on food prices.  So how do I feel about bicycling?  I feel really macho.  Which is hilarious because that's not normally the way I view myself.  Just the sheer amount of physical effort directly contributing to our financial well being has always made me feel more like a man.  I suppose that's one reason to keep cycling.

Take me with you

Tailesen these days either becomes very upset when I'm trying to leave.  He's very adept at spotting when I'm getting ready to go and the other day when I was trying on new gloves to see how they fit with my coat he became very upset thinking I was trying to leave and insisted I hold him and read him a story to reassure him I wasn't going anywhere.  The other day when I was trying to gather things up to go he brought his shoes to me and sat down for me to get him ready to go to.  I think he'd really like to just come with me.

I think I've figured out a large part of why he wants to spend so much time outside, is fascinated by bicylces, and tries to get me to carry him to work.  Its the same phenomenon as when I can sometimes get more work done if I mostly close the office door than if I close it.  If its closed he knows he's been denied access and therefore tries his best to demand entrance.  If its open but mostly shut, he's more likely to think I'm just being boring.  Going to work or school with me is something he never gets to do.  Repeatedly denying access just reinforces that it is something special.  Also, he sees me bike away at one time of day and then hours later sees me come back still riding the bike.  I bet he thinks I spend the whole time at class zipping around on the bicycle.  If daddy loves the outdoors and bicycles that much, it stands to reason he should like them too.  Maybe one day we'll set up a bicycle trailer and I'll have enough time to take him zipping around town.  So far, its not happening.

Heritics of Dune

I think I've decided to give up on the Dune Chronicles.  Books 1-3 were pretty amazing, but I have trouble making myself really want to finish Heritics.  I mean, the earlier books had lots of misogynistic elements in them but the focus in the books wasn't on those elements and they could thus be more or less dismissed as a background or backdrop to a story that wasn't about them.  But in this last book its as if the author tried to pull every nasty female stereotype he could imagine and inflate them to explosive proportions so that some of our characters are apparently mind controlling seducing manipulative freaks who want nothing more than to rule the universe with ultimate power while devoting themselves to being breeding masters over a subjected male subclass who is there to provide sexual submission, sperm, and worship.  Oh, and did I mention this character class is only a slight variant of other groups who are long term members of the story world?  Bring on the bored worm emperor gods any day, Leto was at least interesting in a bored sort of way.  I have to be able to find some character I like and sympathize with or who have goals I can moderately assume to be moderately justifiable before I can find a story accessible.  Maybe if I read farther into the book I would find that magic moment where the story clicked, but I went fairly far into it without finding it, so I'm giving up.  New author and new books here I come!

That's why...

I finally figured out why there is so much broken equipment at my work compared to the previous site and why the place is so... dirty.

They don't have an onsite janitor or IT repair person.

You'd think, no big deal, they probably simply have someone come maybe once a week when the place is closed, right?  No, they really don't pay for janitorial services.  I saw the building cleaned a few weeks ago for the first time in the nearly year since I had been working there.  They took a bunch of team leads and even some ops managers and they dusted and vacuumed.  Given that my boredom routines at work had developed into a habit of scrubbing my work station keyboard and computer vents of  thick wads of dust and scraping the gum off the bottom off the desks so my legs aren't brushing against it all day long I shouldn't be surprised, but I mean really, aren't there people with dust allergies at the place?

And then all the times a computer goes weeks or maybe months with a sign on it saying "don't sit here, (fill in the blank) doesn't work" when new training classes come out and the floor is so crowded I get excused tardies because it took me 5-10 minutes to find a seat again I shouldn't be surprised that they wait till they have a good full days worth of important work before they attempt to call in an outsider to do repairs.  I think this might have something to do with the entire row of desks that is used as a stowage place for broken chairs.

Over the last few weeks as they have started installing luggage padlocks on the headsets to keep people from stealing headsets off the desk, it begs the question, does a dirty broken down environment encourage unprofessional behavior?  Might it have anything to do with the half eaten pop tart I found shoved behind my cubicle computer?  Or the guy I saw today who was resting his feet on top of the desk surface?  I know they care more about having a "low operating cost" than about improving work place intangible values just like on my calls I'm 'supposed' to focus on the tangible value of the service provided over the intangible services I might provide, but I really find my work place kind of disgusting sometimes.

Ender's Game vs Starship troopers

I've been rereading the Ender's game books recently.  Perhaps these are books that I just can't experience the same way twice, but I'm enjoying them a lot less this time.  I'm quite familiar with the overall plot line now, so on reading it again I'm focusing more on smaller details and smaller subplots.  And there's only so much that I can read science fiction sermons on the glory of monogamy, the mysteries of marital oneness, the nature of God, and the speculative arrangement of Mormon cosmology into science before my head feels like its going to explode.  Card has written a unique universe and I can appreciate that.  I think he deserved the hugo/nebula awards he won for speaker for the dead and Ender's Game.  But Card is first an LDS fiction writer, second a science fiction author.  I'd like to highlight large selections of text and write in the margin "And now we interrupt this regularly scheduled plot line for a special report on why wives should be subservient to their husband's" or fill in the blank for whatever he is sermonizing on today.  Its led me to think why this bothered me so much despite having loved Starship Troopers which by any measure is a preachy book.  I mean, the main character in Starship Troopers spends a lot of time describing his childhood participating in government mandated ethics classes.  And frankly, Heinlein has a lot to preach about where I don't think he's even in the same ballpark as the truth.

I think part of the difference is that in Card a lot of the plot tension comes from overly contrived absurdities such as:

• a sentient microscopic disease body, 
• the proposition that one shipload of pre industrial aliens can wipe out the whole human race when presumably most of the inhabited planets they might try to destroy would shoot them down before they'd ever get near enough to land or deposit their viral payload, 
• a virus that can wipe out the whole human race yet one isolated biologist in a backwoods community, limited facilities, and no networked system of fellow researchers can develop a bacterial antidote capable of eliminating the virus from a whole planet without undue difficulty
• A husband whose body will dissolve if his wife isn't more cuddly and nice
• An instinctive science search for ways to survive that involve killing as many people as possible instead of as few as possible
• local sewer systems which are controlled by an interstellar computer network, that can be run independently without difficulty but only if the connection to the instarstellar network is blown to bits

Heinlein has a lot of moral tension as well and some of it is probably contrived.  However, I don't recall feeling any of it is being forced into black and white categories that don't fit them even remotely.  Heinlein also feels like someone I can have a good argument with-wheras since Card is more preaching than arguing so I can't have an argument with him about where's he's right and wrong.  He's not inviting argument.  So far, I prefer Heinlein to Card.

Laundry, toilets, and persistance

My son loves to play games where he takes objects in and out of containers.  A perfect opportunity for him to play these is when Bonnie Jean sorts laundry.  As a standard part of laundry clothes are taken out of the dryer, put into a basket, removed from the basket, folded, and put back into the basket.  If he's lucky Bonnie Jean will even put him inside the laundry basket as she empties the laundry from the drier so he gets to enjoy all the warm clothes as they come down and she'll let him ride inside the laundry basket as it moves to the living room for sorting.  Laundry, from his perspective,  means put things in, take them out, wave them around and rumple them, and put them back in the white plastic laundry basket.

So Bonnie Jean was doing laundry and he was doing his best to participate in the general taking in and out and waving around involved.  He noticed another white plastic container in the room that he hadn't ever used in this game before.  Mommy almost never made a fuss about him playing container games with the laundry, so it was a perfect opportunity.  He grabbed my white Sunday shirt and proceeded to try to stuff it into the kitchen trash can.  Bonnie Jean tells me he was being quite persistant on this point and really really wanted to stuff my white shirt in the trash.

Then again, Bonnie Jean often is telling me these days about how persistent he is.  One of his favorite things is running splashing water.  When we start running his bath water we can hardly keep him out of the tub.  I've given up and started putting him in the tub while its still filling so he can admire how water comes out of the facet.  I have to get him most of the way washed while the water is still running because as soon as its done he'll probably decide its time to get out fairly soon afterwards.  This is all fine and dandy, but we use a diaper sprayer to clean the poop off the cloth diapers into the toilet.  This means that several times a day we make running water spray and splash into the toilet.  Very few things rivet his attention so well.  Since he can pull up on furniture now and is learning to climb it can be a struggle to keep him out of the toilet water.  A while ago Bonnie Jean tells me  he learned he didn't have to give up just because she was between him and the toilet.  He even decided he didn't have to give up when he crawled around her and she blocked him with her leg.  He climbed into the tub, explored a bit till Bonnie Jean had forgotten to watch out for what he might do next, and climbed over the edge of the tub on the side near the toilet to splash in the toilet water.  Just like Mommy, who was still trying to squirt the poop off the diaper.  I got home and Bonnie Jean told me "Your son is very persistent."  Whenever she says that, I know I'd better ask what he did this time...

Happy 4th

Bonnie Jean and I celebrated the 4th by setting off our own fireworks.  I'm guessing we set off about 25 all told.  Not the up in the air kind that were just legalized here, but the cheaper smaller ones that stay on the ground.  Or, at least they are supposed to stay on the ground.  There were a couple that were supposed to spin more or less in the same place on the ground that decided to shoot off side ways and one which levitated onto my neighbors balcony (or at least that's where we think it was headed, never found it again afterwards).  It was fun.  Setting off their own fireworks was a family tradition for her growing up and I had never done it before.

This fourth hasn't felt as sunshiny for me as some in the past.  I've been studying American History post civil war and its harder to talk about being the land of the free when you understand just how recent our understanding of the idea of freedom actually is.  I read a document written by a black man looking back on world war one when he complained about facing the enemy guns abroad and the lynching mobs at home and how tempting it was to simply sit the war out and try not to commit to a nation that hadn't committed towards their safety and freedom.  Or the history of the migrant workers who faced violence, restricted civil rights, and absurdly dangerous working conditions.  Its one thing to speak nostalgicly about all the ethnic minority immigrant groups making up our melting pot nation and another entirely to read about how only about half of the melting pot people stay since they by and large came as migrant workers looking to save up some money to take home to europe.  They weren't very melty and its only later looking back you can talk about how wonderful their integration and naturalization went when at the time depending on the group, place, and time there were mobs that would form to drive ethnic minorities out of town to keep the land and the work available for the 'pure' white race.  Laws were passed so that these ethnic minorities sometimes couldn't vote, couldn't own land, couldn't testify in court, weren't allowed to intermarry etc...

Now, based on my studies the Holocaust completely changed our views of human rights and what was right and wrong concerning racial evaluations.  But once you know all the nitty gritty about how we got here, the surprising thing isn't that its a land of the free.  Its traditionally been a land free for specific groups at specific times.  There are other places you could say well if you only look at the empoered group then sure its a land of the free.  Closer to the truth I think is that the US is one of the first places were certain kinds of thoughts entered human consciousness about human rights and that those ideas have been expanding over time.  And that's a very different from saying it a land of the free.