Life – Page 4 of 19

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.

Sounders vs. Columbus

I just got back from the Sounders vs. Columbus game. I can’t not comment.

Eddie Johnson needs to learn how to pass to his teammates. Bryan Meredith comes off his line far too much. The defense can’t turn the ball over to the opposing team in our third. Our free kicks looked awful. And for heaven’s sake, we need to be able to pass the ball through the mid-field instead of turning the ball over. The Sounders live and die by the 50/50 ball.

The strong points: other than the free kicks, Fredy Montero combined hustle and skill and turned nothing into something more than once. Flaco got himself into dangerous positions several times. Mauro looks a bit off, but still a solid play-maker.

Heading to WisCon next weekend

I will be heading to WisCon next weekend. It’ll be my fourth year attending. At the moment, I’m thinking of canceling, though I probably won’t do so. I have no problem spending two months on my own, but the idea of being in a convention where I know only one or two people for a weekend gives me the heebie jeebies. I love the programming topics, which is why I go.

I do wish I knew more people who were interested in the kind of science fiction that’s discussed there, so I could talk them into going and not feel so on my own. (I should probably start talking it up in like, January, and see if there’s interest. Not wait until 6 days before my flight when it suddenly hits me that I’m gonna be on my own.

The best year was two years ago when Kim went. When Kim’s around, I’ll feel at home.

Sara will be there (if her flight plans don’t get messed up like last year), so there’ll be at least one person I know. And I will love the discussions.

Popular music

I came to popular music late, something which affects my relationship with it, though I can’t tell you exactly how. Mom was pretty religious and a homebody. She liked listening to hymns, church music, and Through The Bible Hour. Dad liked old style country. Mostly Johnny Horton played on repeat. Neither of them encouraged me to engage with popular music, and sometimes actively discouraged it. We also had to pinch pennies so I didn’t get my own radio until 1983. I can’t remember why they bought a new family stereo then, but I got the old one. Something on it was probably broken, though I don’t think it was the record player part. I remember using that.

1983 or 1984 is when I first started listening to popular music at all. I started listening to K-PLUS when Kent and Alan started at the station. I remember a big promotional effort touting their new morning show on the station. I listened to Rick Dees weekly Top 40. Being the OCD person I am, I listed the songs played on that show religiously. If I missed a week for some reason, I would fill in the blanks in subsequent weeks when Dees announced that a song had moved up or down X slots.

K-PLUS and (as it later became) Z-101.5 was my only real exposure to music. Maybe a little bit of K-JET that my ride Craig Adams played in the car when he drove to school my last year of high school. Then I went off to college, and Idaho was a wasteland of music. One Top 40 station, one classic rock station, and other stuff I never payed attention to. I listened to a lot of hair bands.

Anyway, the point of all this is I don’t have a lot of memories of music. So when Donna Summers died today and Facebook exploded with people remembering her music from their childhoods, I don’t get to participate. This happens to me lot. I have little in the way of nostalgic associations for any music.

My connection to songs continues to be ephemeral. I started going to clubs in 1999 and listening to a lot more music. But most of the music only stays in the present. I recognize a lot of the songs played because they’ve been played so often, but I couldn’t tell you who recorded them. Oooh, that’s familiar and catchy, I need to get out on the dance floor. I still have a predilection for catchy and dance-able music. If the song doesn’t have a great hook, the chances of me liking it diminish quite a bit.

Unlike other people, I don’t have the radio on all the time as background at home. My stereo and giant speakers were taking up space for no real reason, so I finally got rid of them a few years ago.

I’m also quite ambivalent about my lack of attachment to music. Sometimes I think I’m really missing out, so I’ll make an effort to listen and understand. And lots of times it just seems like a lot of effort and a waste that I don’t feel bad foregoing.

Contacts?

Time to consider getting contacts I think.

I can’t read the computer screen wearing my glasses. I get glowy blurry double vision. I can read it just fine with my left eye without glasses, which is essentially what I do.

But it’s tiring.

(No, it’s not my prescription. The glasses work just fine when I’m reading a book or even my tablet screen. There’s just something about the brightness or frequency of the laptop screen that messes with my focus.)

Burning Down The House

In addition to meeting a bunch of second cousins and going to a funeral, one of the things I did yesterday (Sunday, that is), was to help clean out aunt Babe’s house. My great grandfather Joseph bought this house in September 1908. Babe has lived there almost her entire life. Since no living relative lives in Madison, it was clean now or leave it to people to do piecemeal when they are in town.

The house itself isn’t in great shape. It dates from the 1870s, when it was a one floor, two room building. An upstairs and a couple of rooms on the side were added later, though I have no idea when. Plumbing and electricity have been added, as well as a foundation. I’m not sure what’s holding it together. Floors sagging. Walls tilting. Portions of ceilings fallen in. It’ll keep lions and tigers and bears out, but not varmints.

I mention that because varmints have been getting in for years. But other than the rooms that Babe inhabited (kitchen, dining room, living room), what the varmints left behind (droppings, chewed up clothing, their dead bodies) hadn’t been removed for a long time. There was enough disease causing detritus in the dust that we all wore masks. Most of us wore heavy duty gloves as well. The pants I wore? They are sitting in a corner now and I’m not going to put them on again until they’re washed twice. We filled 40 or 50 trash bags with clothing, bedding, broken phones, curtains, old Christmas lights, and things we couldn’t even identify.

But buried in all that crud were some gems. Some of the furniture pieces are 100+ year old antiques. They’ll need to be re-upholstered and re-finished for sure. There were hundreds of photos and letters. Photos dating to the civil war. Those looked vaguely like my second great grandfather, Anton Weiss. But we’re not completely sure, because the photos where he’s positively identified were late in life where he’s about 75 years old. Aunt Babe’s letters from Bunny Berigan are there. The deed to the house was there, including the entire history of ownership of the property since 1843 (a lot of the important Wisconsin settlers owned the land at one point or another). There are books and jewelry, including some obvious wedding rings. We’ll have to have a jeweler look at those to see when they were made so we can guess as to whose they were. I’m salivating for when I can get copies of the photos. I did keep a bag of newspaper clippings that had been used as bookmarks. Most of them are obituaries of distant family members.

Anyway, the house wasn’t a hoarders lair. It just hadn’t been cleaned. If you are in the baby boom generation, do your children a favor and go through your stuff now. You’ve got 10 or 30 good years left in you. Get rid of the junk. Clean around the stuff that isn’t junk. Let your family spend their time around the funeral drinking to your memory, fighting over who gets stuck with the lime green chair you love, and poring over your photo albums and old love letters. That part is awesome! Cleaning rat feces, not so much.

The Weiss clan at Aunt Babe’s funeral

I posted a brief note over on the LiveJournal that my great aunt Babe passed away Monday morning. But I locked it because not everyone in the family had heard yet. Not really knowing Babe, I have little to say about her. My main reaction is, damn, you had a good long life. She was born 14 July 1908 in Merrill, Wisconsin. Her family moved to Madison that September, and she lived in that city for the rest of her life. In fact, she lived in the same house for the rest of her life. She was a stylin’ single girl in the late 1920s and 1930s. She dated Bunny Berigan for a time. She worked as an office manager until the early 1970s when she retired. All of this is stuff I learned from reading her letters today or from family members.

So I came to Madison for the funeral. Not because I’m grieving for Aunt Babe. Because she’s the last of her generation in my family, I wanted to honor her life and to support the family members who were close to her. Babe, like her two sisters, never married. But she did a lot of the work raising her brother Glenn’s children after Glenn’s wife died. So his children and grandchildren were very close to her. I wanted to be present for them.

Another reason to come is that a number of those second cousins I haven’t previously met. Without Babe, I didn’t know if the disparate branches would continue to communicate. So I wanted to come to meet them and make friends. Present were my aunts Sue and Jane, her husband and my cousins Dave and Sarah. Them I know. My second cousins Katzi and Lisa came along with their mother. They’re from the Portland area, so I see them a few times a year too. I met Martha, Peter and Caroline for the first time. Those are Glenn’s children mentioned above. Peter’s sons Chris and Stephen came too. Chris I’ve met once, but Stephen was new to me. Another second cousin who came was Katherine. At this point, there’s only one second cousin in the Weiss family I haven’t met. I don’t know if we’ll stay in contact, but I didn’t establish contact, we certainly wouldn’t stay in contact.

Between my dad dying young, mom remarrying, and my grandfather getting divorced a few years before I was born, I don’t feel as connected to the family on my father’s side of the family as much, other than my first cousins from the Seattle area. With all the close family members who’ve died recently, I’ve been spurred to build those connections I haven’t had before. That’s a big reason why I’ve been so big into the genealogy since my grandparents died.

Anyhow, for the short term, mission accomplished.

Rule of Three

I have a rule of thumb. I’ll try three times to make plans with someone else without a definite response. After that, it’s up to them whether or not to do something. For instance, when asking someone out if I get three non-committal maybes, I won’t bother to ask the person out again. If they were secretly hoping for a relationship but were following some set of advice that says to play hard to get, it didn’t work. Or if they are just too busy to carve out an hour to hang out, I’ll know their time management would annoy the hell outta me if we were to date. This rule of thumb applies to making friends, business relationships, etc.

Any kind of definite response triggers the end of the rule. A no is obviously a no and I’m not going to pursue it. If the answer is yes, obviously the rule no longer applies. If the answer is something along the lines of I can’t do X, but how about Y that also counts as a definite answer.

It’s important to remember this is a rule of thumb, not something I apply rigidly. It depends on the person and the level of relationship I already have with them. But as a rule of thumb it keeps me from wasting my time.

Sometimes people just have to say maybe or cannot commit to a plan. But after three times it tells me they have a fundamental problem (perhaps justified) with being up front. It’s pretty demoralizing to keep chasing something while being strung along. I refuse to be strung along.

2012 Democratic precinct caucuses

Washington Democrats logo

Last Sunday I participated in the Democratic caucuses. I also participated in 2008, but that was a very different experience. In 2008, I lived in Ferndale for 5 days of the week, and was here on weekends. It was in the midst of the primary between Obama and Clinton, so TOPPS school was packed to overflowing with people there to participate. I had to be back in Whatcom county the day of the caucus, so I couldn’t stay for the whole thing. I stayed long enough to register my preference for Clinton, but couldn’t stay longer.

This year, with only Obama on the ballot, participating was quite a bit lower. My precinct caucus was in the Montlake Community Center. Precinct 43-2001 had only three participants. Me and two women who had never participated in a caucus before. One had been working in France for a decade and had to vote absentee. The other was an Obama campaign volunteer whose parents were American and German, and she’d been living in Germany as a young girl during World War II.

They asked me to be precinct caucus chair, since this is my third caucus. So we all voted for Obama, and then had to select delegates to the county convention and the District 43 caucus. Due to votes in previous elections, 43-2001 had 7 delegates allocated to it. The other two participants could only attend the District 43 caucus. nevertheless, we voted all three of us as delegates.

We also got to propose resolutions that eventually could be made part of the Democratic platform. Those are not debated or voted on at the precinct caucus level. Every resolution proposed is forwarded to the county convention. I assume the organizers combine similar resolutions to avoid duplication at that level. The older woman had seen a resolution on auditing the Department of Defense, but had forgotten to bring it and couldn’t remember the lengthy wording (or any detail at all). So I proposed a short broadly worded resolution for her in the hopes that someone in another caucus was proposing the resolution the woman wanted, and the organizers would combine them. There was a global warming resolution being passed around, and we put it on our list too. I added a resolution that the Democratic party support marriage equality and the referendum on marriage equality that will likely be on the ballot this November.

The district caucuses and the King County Convention are next weekend at 10 a.m. (one event each day). At the point, I’m planning on attending both, if I can find out where they are. The locations were undetermined as of the caucuses last weekend.