Philip Weiss

William Solle’s incongruent age of first marriage

I just noticed something interesting today. The 1930 US Census asked people at what age they first got married. Here are the answers for my great grandfather William Solle and great grandmother Flora Sorenson Solle:

William and Flora got married in 1910, which is verified by their marriage certificate. In 1930, Flora was 42 and first got married at age 22. That matches up with the date of her marriage to William in 1910. However, William is 65 and first got married at age 42. That works out to be 1907, which is not when he married Flora.

Census information isn’t particularly accurate or exact. However, that’s intriguing enough that I now am going to start looking for possible records of an earlier marriage. I may have additional relatives I didn’t know about.

Death and taxes

Got the call from the accountant this morning. They’ve got all the taxes figured out and the forms ready for me. This includes for my mom’s estate, the trust, and for my dad.

Once those are sent in, I can close the estate.

It will happen before the 4 year anniversary of mom’s death.

More phone banking

Thursday I participated in my third week of phone banking for Referendum 74. It was a very odd session.

My own dialer session called 141 people, but I actually had only 3 conversations with people and none of them were undecided. They were all strongly for marriage equality. With those folks, all we generally do is remind them that a vote to approve Referendum 74 is a vote for marriage equality. But not only were there no undecided people, there were no anti-marriage equality people. I had a lot of hang-ups, refused to answer, not homes, and wrong numbers. I think I had 3 people who were angry we had called them. Don’t you know my number is on the Do not call list? asked one lady. Nope, I don’t. See, lady, political calls don’t have to scrub people based on the do not call register. There’s this little thing called the First Amendment. Of course, I don’t tell them that or argue with them. I simply just ask Would you like me to put you on our do not call list? and then I do. Anyway, bummer about not talking with any undecided voters.

I also spent some time training a fellow next to me. He really had a hard time with it. In the role play before we started calling, I played an undecided callee. He really wanted to convince my character that marriage equality is a matter of civil rights and started to veer into trying to argue my character into voting for marriage equality. Which isn’t what we are trying to do. The phone bank script emphasizes the personal and emotional benefits of marriage for gays and lesbians. Rather than talk about fairness in hospital visitation rights, we’re supposed to talk about how visitation means a gay/lesbian family member gets to visit their loved one. It’s sometimes a subtle but important distinction. People sometimes think domestic partnerships are fair, for instance. We’ll tell them that no one dreams of a domestic partnership document signing, they dream of a wedding. The point, I think, is to make it personal and real. Even the prejudiced people, for the most part, don’t hate gays. They fear them, and we’re trying to make gay marriage just a bit less scary.

Anyway, dude to the left of me kept slipping into arguing. He also got off script early on too. Rather than tell people we’d like to talk with them about the freedom to marry, as the script notes, he started telling people we’d just like to ask a quick question about Referendum 74. Which doesn’t get the idea of the freedom to marry or even marriage equality burbling in callees’ heads at the beginning. Talking about a referendum tends to close off discussions before they start. And second, if they are leaning against, it’s gonna make them feel lied to when we do want to talk more than a quick question. Liked the kid, but he was making things hard for himself.

I won’t be doing the phone bank this week though. There’s a Sounders match on Thursday night. However, I’ll be participating in a training session on Wednesday so they can have me run future phone bank sessions. We’ll see how those go. I’m surprisingly good on the phone. I found this out when calling people on behalf of Ron Sims in 2004. I don’t know how good I’ll be at helping people do this though. As I’ve found out this summer, I’m not exactly a natural teacher.

Phone banking for Referendum 74

For the last two weeks I’ve spent 3 hours on Thursdays phone banking in support of Referendum 74. Washington United for Marriage has been running a pretty organized campaign to make sure marriage equality passes. They are doing phone banks at least 4 days a week. They’ve run some demographics to identify likely undecided voters. And then we call them. Find out what their concerns are about letting gay and lesbian people get married. Try to allay those concerns. Talk to them about how much marriage might mean to gay and lesbian families. It’s all persuasion rather than arguing.

My phone bank equipment has dialed almost 400 people in those 6 hours, and I’ve had about 35 actual conversations with people. We get a lot of people who don’t want to talk, and a lot of answering machines and wrong numbers and calls that just don’t connect. And out of those 35 conversations I maybe have nudged 2 people a bit more toward supporting Referendum 74. Just having the conversation that isn’t an argument gets most of them thinking about it in a way they haven’t previously. In the end, if we get only 1,000 people to support it who otherwise would have voted against it, that might be all the difference we need.

I kinda sorta think Referendum 74 will pass pretty easily, but that may just be optimism. I strongly support it, and live in an area where most everyone else also strongly supports it. I’m in a bubble that likely is inducing wishful thinking. But I kinda know that, so I’m working to get this thing passed anyway, just in case I am wrong.

Which reminds me, do you want to help out? Even if you only do one phone bank, that’s 20 people who have a conversation about marriage that won’t otherwise have that conversation. I’ll make you a pie or buy you a beer if you help out.

Teaching

So the teaching gig is going all right. But not great.

Issues:

The no curriculum thing is really a drag. I don’t think I’d want to be stuck with slavishly following an existing curriculum. But starting off with no curriculum has been difficult. I spend a couple of hours each day planning what to cover in the four hours in the afternoon.

Classroom management. Specifically, I really don’t know how to handle the differing speeds at which each of the students are picking this up. One student struggles with the basics of HTML syntax, while another wants me to teach him Javascript.

Teenage attention span. I swear they all have A.D.D. They all want to try out the fancy HTML/CSS toys and go way off track. Which is fine to a degree, as I don’t want them to learn the one true way of Web development. But they get themselves into dead ends from which they don’t know how to extricate themselves. Getting them individually unstuck takes up a lot of time.

And lastly, while none of these issues are really all that major, I don’t have a teaching support network. I have general support and encouragement from friends, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Specifically, what I wish I had is people who can answer questions like I’m trying to do X, how do I do it? and this happened, what do I do? People I don’t have to seek out, but who are already there. I don’t have a breakroom with other teachers, for instance. That would be awesome.

Still glad I took the job, but wishing I knew how to do it better.

Joseph Peter Weiss

My great grandfather Joseph Peter Weiss was born on the 4th of July 1866 in Cassville, Wisconsin to Anton Weiss, a hardware dealer, and Anna Clara Voigt. Joseph moved to Merrill Wisconsin as a young man to operate a hardware business with his older brother Robert. In the mid-1890s Robert left Merrill and chased gold rushes across the west, leaving the business to Joe, who continued to operate it until 1908. In that year, he moved to Madison and became a hardware dealer in partnership with another older brother, Theodore, until he retired.

In November 1891, Joe returned to the Cassville area to marry Frankie Ryan in Patch Grove. The husband and wife returned to Merrill to start their family. They had six children: Florence Marie, Joseph William, Helen Catherine, Richard Glenn, George Archibald, and Laura Ann Frances. All were born in the Merrill area, though Frances’ birth came just months before the move to Madison.

In Madison, Joe purchased a house at 740 Jenifer Street, a mere 8 blocks from the Capitol building and 1 block from Lake Monona. He lived there 52 years. He died on the 7th of November 1960 aged 94 years, and was survived by his wife and 5 of his children. His remains buried in Resurrection Cemetery in Madison.

Teaching web building

And in one other bit of news, I started this afternoon on a temporary part time job teaching a group of 8 high school students how to create and build web sites. So for the next two months I will not have the free time I have had. Instead of a flexible half-time schedule that I’ve been doing for my one client, I will be doing that work in the mornings and heading to South Park Community Centery in the afternoon for the class. A lot less flexibility and I’ll need to be way more organized to get my personal stuff done.

Also, this is the first time I’ll have taught in many many years. My previous teaching experience was as an assistant to someone else, or when someone else already prepared the material to be covered (when I worked at the Department of Employment). This time I have to come up with the lesson plans and activities myself, as well as hold high schoolers attention for 4 hours a day. Oh, and I had all of 2½ days to come up with the first day’s plan. I did a lot of breaking the ice activities today. Thought getting them talking would be good before we dived into HTML. Which will be the next few days. Once they have the hang of basic HTML and CSS we’ll move into WordPress and also cover “social marketing” and some basic web design.

Oh, and the cool thing about the program. If the students do well, they get paid for this.

heart attack-ack-ack!

Also last Monday, my aunt had a heart attack. I posted something about it, but locked it down to friends at the time. The situation was not good for a bit. However, the latest email update was from her instead of my uncle. And she gets released from the hospital tomorrow! Which is most excellent news! Likely to be no permanent damage even. I am thrilled because we’ve had enough crappy news in my family the last few years. We could stand to go a decade or two without more.

Sounders vs. Earthquakes at Kezar

My brother called me last Monday and asked if I wanted to go to the Sounders vs. Earthquakes U.S. Open Cup match that was happening Tuesday. He kicked in some of his miles to make the trip happen. Dan lives about 8 blocks from Kezar stadium where the contest was to be performed. Flew down Tuesday morning on Southwest, which was an experience so much better than any other flying experience I’ve had in years. I picked up a Sounders jersey for my nephew Victor and also brought him one of my old season ticket holder scarves.

I tried to explain to Dan and Brenda about Seattle fans, particularly E.C.S., who made up the bulk of those supporting the Sounders side at the game. I don’t think she believed me when I said our fans have some mean chants. Her face contorted in different directions when E.C.S. started up a let him die! chant in response to an Earthquakes player who went down particularly easily. The you’re a bastard referee chant brought up some wide eyes too.

But the drama came when we sat down in the section next to E.C.S. instead of in the E.C.S. section. All the seats were G.A., but the stadium staff really didn’t want Sounders supporters spreading out. Three or four times the staff came up to us and asked or told us to move in with E.C.S. I refused because we had a 6 year old with us. He wouldn’t be able to see or hear the game in the midst of the jumping E.C.S faithful.

Eventually the guy gave me the line that it’s just that his supervisor told him and he was just following directions. I told him he needed to get his supervisor to come down and explain to the 6 year old that he’d have to stand behind the loud jumping people. Then about 30 other people (most with young kids) saw we weren’t budging and moved over themselves. About then the supervisor must have given up, because the staff guy just waved us into the section we were already in at that point.

Washington United for Marriage

The last time I really cared about a ballot measure was in 2008 when the Death with Dignity Act was an initiative. I have cared about other initiatives, but not to the point where I’ve been willing to go sign up to help out in place of other stuff I was dealing with. But this year there is one I care about: Referendum 74. Gay Marriage. As you can guess, I’m all for this. While I think having domestic partnerships was an important middle step in the political process toward approving same sex marriage, it was only an interim step. Now it’s time.

From the emails I’ve received, one of the strategies they are employing is to get out the vote as much as possible in Seattle, where the referendum is likely to have overwhelming support.

Thursday I get to spend an hour in training with Washington United for Marriage so I can volunteer. Saturday I’ll be participating with Washington United in Seattle’s Pride parade. I’ll be walking in the parade and handing out pamphlets. And before the official start and end I’ll be carrying a clipboard trying to get people to sign up to be part of Washington United.