Life – Page 3 – King Rat

Covers for Aicardi

Fantasy author Jim C. Hines did a thing a while ago where he tried to duplicate the contorted poses of female characters on various book covers. It was a hit. People offered money if he’d do it again. Now he’s doing it for charity, the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation specifically. Donate money and as overall donation levels are reached, he picks a a donor at random and attempts to duplicate the cover of the donor’s choice. So far, over $4,500 has been donated to help people suffering from a pretty shitty illness.

I kicked in $100. And my choice was selected. I asked for the cover of Jeaniene Frost’s At Grave’s End. This is the pose:

I attempted this pose before submitting it, to see if it was indeed possible. It is, but it isn’t easy. It’s also useless as hell. When done like the cover, I was unable to move quickly at all. There’s no balance, and my center of gravity is not over my legs. I just couldn’t spring up to take on bad guys from that position. I suspect the look they were attempting was hot and fancy babe ready to spring into action to kill you but decided to sexy it up well past realistic. As cover artistry does. And it’s just not that hot in my view.

Jim Hines posted the first two poses this morning, including A Groin Cramping Pose:

For the record, the hottest cover pose for me is this:

It’s objectifying as hell (legs and butt only please), but the pose is doable. Anyone wanna guess why I like it? Stompy fucking boots for the win.

Looking at a new kitchen

Now that I have unused capacity for stress in my life, I’m finally moving forward on remodeling my apartment. The big thing is to rip out the kitchen and put in an entirely new one. I’ve long griped about the limited cupboard and counter space in the kitchen. So that will be no more. In the mock-ups below, the kitchen extends out into the area where my kitchen table currently sits.

Mock up #2 is of the other side, where my refrigerator and range are currently. Part of the wall there will be removed to let in more light, and there will be counter space to either side of the range.

I am also planning on replace all the carpeting with laminate flooring and getting the popcorn ceiling material remove. I get that styles change and all, but whoever invented popcorn ceiling material and all the people who installed it need to have their heads checked. The shit is ugly, and it can’t be cleaned. It’s not like I walk on the ceiling and track mud all over it, but in an old building like this, all it takes is one water leak and the popcorn material has a permanent mark.

I’m excited about this.

The downside is this is going to cost me a lot of money. I had budgeted a lot for it, but the first estimate I received is about $1,000 over my budget and it doesn’t include replacing any of my appliances or furniture or the cost of storing my stuff for a month. One of my tasks this week is to find another contractor to give me a second bid. Thing is, the first bidder has done a lot of work for my family and it was really good work. I’d like to use them if I can, but it means I will need to find some extra money.

The Freedom to Marry passes in Maryland and Maine, and leads in Washington

I’ve put in a lot of hours over the last four months making phone calls for Referendum 74. I know people who put in far more hours than I did. Tonight, it appears as if our work paid off. Referendum 74 is getting approved at just under 52% of the vote. There are about 600,000 votes left to count in the state, and one quarter of them are in King County, which has Referendum 74 passing by 65%. I ran the numbers and put them in a Google Sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvAkwpHQfSD4dGQ2OFFuMmo3T0x2Yno1MnhSRENRaFE

Signs point to approve with the assumption that late breaking ballots do no worse than votes counted earlier. I think that’s a reasonable assumption, given the great last minute Get Out The Vote effort from Washington United For Marriage. What I don’t know how to project is how many more ballots will arrive for each county, as I have no idea what kind of turnout is reasonable to presume.

Meanwhile Maryland and Maine passed marriage equality. The tide has turned.

And on the fourth year…

Four years ago right about now mom died.

This year, I haven’t broken down at random times. So that’s a plus.

It doesn’t seem like that long though. I still remember the 48 hours leading up to her death very vividly.

But in other ways, it’s been forever. I finally got everything for her estate done, signed the final paperwork and sent it to the lawyer on Thursday. I hate to think how long this would have taken if the family had fought over anything. Being the executor has felt like it would go on forever. Now I wait for final notification and hope I didn’t screw anything up.

Tomorrow, I will drive to Lynden and leave flowers on her grave. I’d do it today, but I am leading a phone bank for Approve Referendum 74 tonight, and that is too important to skip. For the rest of the local family, I leave an evergreen branch on their graves around Christmas, to continue my grandfather’s tradition. However, mom’s buried too far away to do that if there’s snow. The flowers I leave aren’t elaborate. I’ll probably just buy a small marigold. Mom doesn’t care. She’s dead. This is for me to keep memories alive.

Amazing Cake!

I apologize for posting this all over my social footprint today. However, this cake is just too amazing to not share pretty much everywhere. Today was the last day for my summer teaching gig. One of the students made this and brought it in for the class to enjoy.

The young man who made this is in high school. I couldn’t make macaroni and cheese from a box in high school.

Don’t Do This

I have purposefully left my wifi open and free to use for anyone close enough to do so. If you are in my building, look for the SSID ApproveRef74. No password, and for the most part, no restrictions.

Today I realized someone in the building has been running a server off my wifi and has been maxing out my upload bandwidth. I don’t know who, but his name is James. Or at least I assume so because his computer was named JAMES-PC. That computer is now banned from my network.

If you look at the graph, the green is me watching a very high quality video feed. No, not porn. A soccer match between DC United and Philadelphia Union. The blue is the dipshit who owns JAMES-PC transmitting nearly as much data as I was watching. Way to take advantage of my hospitality.

Since I can’t send a message to James, I’m leaving this out there in case he googles himself or the SSID or something. When someone offers free wifi, don’t make it unusable. Now you have to buy your own wifi. If you aren’t James and you are doing this to someone else’s wifi, stop.

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.