Filed under: Uncategorized
Well, Gustav is blowing through, and I’m actually a little scared. Just about every tree has dropped, at my guess, 1/3 of its branches. Some have cracked halfway up; others just dropping limbs as big as a 16 inches in diameter. I live in an older neighborhood, full of trees, which is what makes it so wonderful, until a day like today, and then it’s just downright scary. 3-4 more hours to go… Every time the wind changes, a new set of limbs drop. One fairly large tree, on our property line, just in front of both my house and my neighbors, just broke halfway up and fell just onto the edge of our neighbors house. Hopefully not too much damage, but you can’t really tell because the whole thing is as tall as the house. (They are ok.) Gonna be fun to clean all this up…
Filed under: Uncategorized
Today, I’m sitting around the house, waiting for Gustav to come and go. The transformer around the block has groaned at least 4 times already this morning, so I’m guessing the neighborhood will be without power, shortly. So far, things have been relatively calm. We’ve had several inches of rain, and a ton of small twigs, leaves and branches clear out of the trees. Every little bump or thump makes me look up out of the windows.
It’s funny how people have different attitudes about hurricanes. I grew up here; to me, they are big nasty storms that you prepare for a little, and then you just wait through them. Sometimes you come out just fine, sometimes you lose something. Or everything. It’s just part and parcel of living down here. To be fair, Baton Rouge is the first stop out of the evacuation zone – so what we get is not even comparable to what the true coastal zones take. I’ve never evacuated, never left everything behind knowing full well it might not be there when I returned.
My husband is from California and Texas, and his attitude is wholly different. Maybe it’s just the humidity down here, but he views losing power for a few days or a week as about the worst thing that can happen, short of our house being destroyed. To me, it’s an opportunity to really clean out the fridge. Getting a gas-line automatic generator seriously eased his nervousness about personal discomfort; we’ll have just about everything except our washer and dryer, unless something breaks a gas line. Our refrigerator may not get cleaned in its lifetime.
EOC and LSU this time are completely on the ball. I assume part of it is our change in governmental leadership, and part of it is the lessons we learned from Katrina. My husband works at the EOC during emergencies – one of his office’s functions is geological mapping, so he helps provide maps of water levels along with a whole bunch of other stuff. He said that EOC yesterday (1 day prior) was already at the same point as it was 2 days after Katrina passed. LSU put out a call for volunteers ahead of time, has announced closure through Wednesday, and really prepared campus for those staying as well as those who will be sheltering there. So I think the state is in good shape.
Now there’s nothing to do but wait for it to pass…
Tropical Storm/Depression Fay is rolling over Baton Rouge today, so there’s nothing to do outdoors. When it rains this much, I like best to sleep, but the DH is snoring with the dogs, so cooking will make a close second. I like to make red beans and refrigerate or freeze them, then eat them another day. Here’s my recipe:
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
- 1 small or medium yellow onion, chopped
- 2 links andouille sausage (Richard’s, for preference)
- 1 lb red kidney beans
- Tony Chachere’s seasoning salt (or a mix of cayenne, salt, and a little garlic powder)
- 1 – 2 bay leaves
- olive oil
In a 2 1/2 quart stock/sauce pot, saute garlic and onion in a little olive oil for about as long as it takes to slice the sausage. Add the sausage. Let that get started, then add beans, and hot water to fill the pot. Add bay leaves, and Tony’s to taste. I like about a 2 second pour – which is probably somewhere between 2 and 3 tablespoons. I usually add a good pinch of sea salt first; I’m don’t handle a lot of cayenne pepper well.
Bring to a boil; reduce to a simmer, and let go until beans are soft – 2 to 3 hours. Serve over white or brown rice. Especially good when you add a chicken bouillon cube to the cooking water.
Refrigerate up to a week, freeze up to a few months. Mmm, mmm, good. Perfect dinner for when you get home after a rough day and don’t feel like cooking. Serve with garlic bread and/or a green salad.
Tomorrow I will start Bob Mixon’s online course which should teach me a little about what is necessary, architecturally, to create a successful implementation of Sharepoint. I’m actually really looking forward to it, since I have been dragging my heels since Sharepoint was dumped in my lap. Read my review next week.
I am also very much looking forward to getting my new hire started, which should help clear my desk enough that I can focus on something – anything – for more than the usual 20 minutes I get to myself now. Maybe I won’t have to resort to completely pretending to be out of the office if I can offload some of my smaller tasks… and maybe I’ll be able to make some progress on the larger projects that I have been wanting to work on for over a year…
Part of the reason that I like knitting is that it is the inverse of work – there is time for perfection, there is time to throw it away and start over again and make it right, or just better. Only these socks I’ve been working on… I’ve totally missed a column of pattern stitches and it is taking every ounce of teeth-grinding I’ve got not to rip back 1/2 of the sock and start again. You don’t notice when they are on, and I’ve got other projects I’d really like to start. Not being a multiple project person, ripping back would mean waiting another month to start on christmas presents that probably already won’t get finished. And I keep finding new things to make! So hard…
I’ve been reading Drucker’s Management lately, which is – totally surprisingly – a truly interesting read. Just about everything has an antecdote to illustrate, and it’s broken into lots of little digestible bits. I find myself picking it up and reading a few pages when I’m ready to throw the socks out the window, which is pretty high praise for what is essentially a textbook. One of the most interesting aspects is the books focus on the knowledge worker and how that differs from the traditional task-oriented worker – something which I really appreciate, being in IT. Lots of goodies there…
Lately, I have had a fascination, almost a hunger, for children’s stories. Well, young adult stories. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was I just too tired to read my normal range of fiction? Bored? Regressing into stupidity and a smaller vocabulary?
Then, randomly playing songs on my iPod, I heard David Crosby’s “Hero”. It has a couple of lines that struck a chord:
“It was one of those great stories that you can’t put down at night. The hero knows what he has to do, and he wasn’t afraid to fight. The villian goes to jail while the hero goes free. I wish it were that simple for me.”
… and …
“And the reason that she loved him was the reason I loved him, too. He never wondered what was right or wrong; he just knew.”
That’s the attraction; the young adult stories that I’ve been reading address the adult problems of the world, with black and white solutions – absolutely wrong or right – and it’s O.K.
Harry Potter and Lord Voldermort who is unquestionably bad – Lord Voldermort gets it in the end, and even if there is a cost, it’s unquestionably worth it. It’s a battle unquestionably worth fighting.
Thomas Pullman’s Lyra in The Golden Compass (which I read for the first time years ago, and have picked up again since seeing the movie) and subsequent stories – … along with Madam Coulter…
Fiction with clearly defined, clearly bad, bad guys and clearly defined, clearly good, good guys – even when they have flaws – is just soothing, because everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, and no one sits on the fence. Those who do are traitors, and therefore bad, even if they occasionally contribute to whatever good is up to.
Unfortunately, life isn’t ever that clear, and people such as my DH who see just about everything in terms of black and white drive me absolutely bonkers. The world isn’t black and white. Those stories are fictions, because, magic aside, they wouldn’t really happen that way in the real world. Hardly anyone can be good (or bad) all the time, and the situations we face are rarely clean-cut either. There’s always at least two sides to everything. So it’s soothing to get into a fiction where right and wrong are as clearly opposite as black and white.
Of course, this type of fiction is always a little shallow; the best stories are the ones that mash it all up (Ender’s Game, for example). Why? Because they are a better reflection of reality, of ourselves, and easier to connect to and really feel. But it’s not as easy to cheer our characters on, because we see do a little of the not-so-good along with the good. We want to smack them upside the head and yell, “You moron! what the hell were you thinking?!?!?” If you notice, young adult fiction doesn’t often have the hero do things that warrant that.
As a kid, those simplified versions of the world act as a sort of lesson – here’s what to expect when you get there, and here’s the moralized ideal of how to act when you face whatever it is. Which, I supppose, is as good a starting point as any. As an adult, though, it’s a nice escape back into a simpler place where those very same moralized ideals rarely work out-of-the-box.
Filed under: Uncategorized
So, I’ve had over a week now to process what I learned at ALI about MBTI, especially as it relates to me. At the institute, there was a lot of “Oh, so that’s why I’m that way!” going around. Which seems kind of silly, because it’s a description of how you are, not what makes you the way your are… but anyway, while it all rang true, coming home, being aware, I’ve had little revelations all week,
like, the reason I have trouble giving student workers projects is because I am not specific enough about what I want, and I have trouble being specific because it’s not usually fully defined in my head yet. I know what I want, what’s in my mind… Why don’t you?
Having international graduate students has actually helped this some, because I have different expectations for how I’m going to have to explain what I want; I just need to carry that over to the rest of them…
like, the reason I have nearly 30 unplanned skeins of yarn is the interest in starting something new, in suddenly knowing what that yarn needs to be, and the reason I can’t bring myself to finish the last 8 rows of a second sock while I wind yarn I don’t have plans for yet is because the sock is old news and I’m ready for something new….
like, I’m becoming more (socially) confident as I get older, maybe because I care a great deal less about what others think, or maybe because I’m just getting more practice, but when I have a period where I pull out of myself, I end up needing a period nearly twice as long where I can pull down the shutters and go on vacation from everyone else…
—-
Specifically as it relates to management, I’m having a lot of new experiences this week. I have an employee to whom I gave a reasonably well defined (in my mind) assignment. We had numerous discussions about workflow and business logic, and that all seemed well and good. She told me repeatedly that everything was on schedule. Friday was the deadline, and I begin to go through it to test, and not a single screen actually works. The back-end code is pretty decent, and mostly functional, but the UI is totally not functional – as in no action results in anything but an error.
While I was off in my own world of work for the last 6 weeks, it never occurred to me to go digging around in my employee’s work world – if she had trouble, she’d let me know, right? Add to this that she is an immigrant, so we have cultural mis-communications as well. Rather than tell me “No, I can’t do that” it is better to agree and then not deliver. Absolutely not my preference.
So this weekend, I am culling through the application, rewriting and finishing every screen I can, and thinking very hard about my lesson: Just because people say they can do something, doesn’t mean they can or will. Not everyone will ‘fess up and say they can’t, or won’t. I’ve got to pay closer attention, and try to ask in ways that don’t require them to say no. Ugh. I’ve always sucked at learning other languages; I can’t imagine learning different languages for different people is going to be any easier, even if it is all English.
I got back from Traverse City, MI, last night, where I attended the ACE conference, followed by the first session of the ACE Leadership Institute (ALI), a program designed specifically for people working in Cooperative Extension areas.
In a previous post, I mentioned that I had signed up for Twitter. Today, a fellow tweeter posted a link to this article that explains specifically why IT people should be interested. After hearing another session on it at ACE, I think I finally have a grasp on it; it’s IM or SMS pulled into an RSS feed. I post, you subscribe, you read. Instead of keeping up with people in conversations (people who I probably wouldn’t take the time to otherwise keep up with), I volunteer information and read what they volunteer. Yesterday, I signed up for facebook, which I had been avoiding doing, because the alumni of the ALI sent out an invitation. More exploration into social technology…
At this first session of ALI, we spent a lot of time studying Myers-Briggs personality types. I suppose I didn’t find out too much that was really new to me about me, but one of the interesting things about it was some of the things that I do that really annoy/hurt other people. I’ve caught myself doing one of them twice since coming home. Having heard what I do from an objective perspective makes me very aware of the fact that I am doing it. Sigh… so much to work on.
You’ll probably be hearing much more about all this in the next posts – it takes me a while to process information and I’m only just getting started…
Surprisingly, I did not knit one single stitch while in Michigan or in transit! I did however read an entire book – Smiley’s People by John Le Carré – and start another. Smiley’s People is the fourth and final book in the George Smiley series, a set which I have thoroughly enjoyed. It’s sort of like an complicated version of “Murder She Wrote” – a spy series with very little actual action, where most of the story is you watching George Smiley recall events, hear accounts of others’ experiences, and put a ridiculously complicated puzzle together. It took me two novels just to get a handle on the type of world he lives in, but it was worth the effort. I started with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and am going to have to go back and read it again, but boy! was it fun.
On a different note, if you are a Coldplay fan, you can hear one of their songs from their newest album here. That’s it for today!
Filed under: Random
So I’m looking on Google to see who does custom/commission jewelry in my area and this is what tops Google, no matter how I search:
http://www.seemygrill.com/Louisiana/Baton_Rouge/
Wow.
So I’m staying at the Bayshore Resort hotel. Room rate? Approximately 130$ before taxes. Last night, I was disappointed, but I was also exhausted, without luggage and notably cranky. So, I thought, before I write a hot-headed scathing review, I’ll take a day to relax, pay attention, etc.
Let me start with my complaint from yesterday:
Question: What kind of hotel doesn’t provide a coffee maker in the room?
Answer: The same kind that doesn’t have a frickin’ reading chair. My reading options are a) on bed or b) in horribly uncomfortable straight-backed wooden desk chair or c) on balcony plastic chair in 50 degree weather.
So, my ranting seems justified. I can’t remember having ever paid this much for a hotel room, bayfront or not, that was part of a hotel without a restaraunt and room service, and didn’t have a chair with a cushion or a coffee maker.
Oh yes, and I can hear everything that occurs on the second floor, every door closing on my wing on my (1st) floor, and I think some things that occur on the third floor. I heard no less than 5 distinct bathtubs running last night, and that did not include my own.
The decor is out-dated. The beds are not bad, but not great, either. The pool is ok, and the hot tub is nice, and both are indoors, which is 50 degree weather is a good thing. The view is great, but opening the door to hear the waves is cold (I know, that is not the hotel’s fault), but the hvac system sounds an awful lot like a garbage truck! Gah. And the breakfast is mediocre, even if the coffee is good, but I have to get dressed to enjoy the freakin’ coffee. Gah, again.
And since there is no-where comfortable to sit, I can’t really knit, which calms me. You can read in bed, but I haven’t yet mastered the art of knitting in bed. Shall I say it, even though it sounds frightfully pathetic? Yes, it makes my wrists hurt. So do heavy books, which is why I’m picky about the size of a book, even if it sounds interesting. So I can’t knit, I can’t calm, which means it’s only going to get crankier from here on out.
I miss my armchair.
I have to wonder if the other places down this road are better or not. Surely, they would not be particularly more expensive, and maybe I could have a reading chair for the evening, and a coffee maker so that I could actually enjoy the balcony I’m paying for in the morning…
Aside from all that, my coworker, her husband, and I had dinner at Amical, a local restaraunt, that I thought was excellent. I had duck with a beer and (local) cherry sauce. The both had fish that must have been good, since they ate just about all of it. And the chocolate raspberry mousse…. well…
We enjoyed a local pinot noir from Blackstar Farms, which is also a bed and breakfast. It’s a lovely, peppery red that went excellently with my duck (not sure about their fish). There are a number of wineries around here, which I probably won’t get to see any of, but is apparently a pretty big part of the culture/economy. Cherries are also in abundant supply, though not so early in the year.
Tomorrow, I intend to be a fully aggravating third wheel and tag along to the Mackinac Island Lilac Festival, which occurs through June. Not sure what we’ll see, but maybe at least the weather will be warmer and there will be some things in bloom. Today we saw a lot of plants that looked like hostas, but bloomed of short stalks little tiny flower, and maybe some lady’s slippers? I’m not familiar with the fauna of the area, but will have to look around online, to see what it might have been.
So far, it’s been a relaxing trip, in spite of lost luggage and (to me) a sub-standard hotel.
As a principle, I don’t keep up with current events/trends/politics/etc. I find most of it inflammatory and depressing, and since my husband keeps up with it all, I figure the next time there is a serial killer or another world war begins, he’ll be sure to let me know. So my mom, who knows this, occassionally sends me articles she thinks will interest me.
Today’s article, The Great Seduction, from the New York Times, is a lovely little opinion column about the deterioration of financial mores. Reading it, and knowing that I am not one of the masses of people it discusses, makes me appreciate even more the way I was brought up. When I was very young, my dad gave me a loan so that I could buy some roller skates. I defaulted on my loan, and he repossessed my roller skates. It’s a great story really, and people who hear it usually give my dad a hard time about it while laughing. But it was one of the truly shaping experiences of my life; since then I have understood the value of money *very* well, and always saved enough for what I wanted, or had the credit (and understood correct use of credit) to get it.
I have friends who live with, what would be to me, an astounding amount of debt, much of it consumer debt. Sometimes we talk about money and their attitude about it really just blows me away. It is not a state of mind that I can comprehend. It’s not really my place to say anything, so I don’t, but I wonder what these friends are going to do if they every have kids, or when they get old enough to retire and don’t have any savings. I suppose, I’ll help pay for it with my taxes.
On the other hand, now that I have had a job for a number of years, I am watching my own frugality slip away. I don’t have any consumer debt to speak of, and I pull quite a bit of savings out of my paycheck each month, but I find myself frequently saying, “I work for a living; I can buy this and I deserve to be able to buy it”. So far, I don’t exceed my paycheck but I frequently get very close.
How does one back-pedal? Budgets are all good and everything, but when you truly have to cut back, where do you do it? My personal weakness is clothing. I have a very nice closet, and I donate annually to Goodwill and take some of it off of my taxes. But if I find anything in my favorite store, I find at least 250$ worth, and of course I take it all home. For over a year, I’ve said I’ll start exercising restraint (and so far, that’s only come in the form of not going to the store at all). But the best way would be to go to the store, and exercise restraint there.
How do you teach an entire society to back-pedal? How do you educate them? I remember growing up, there was a lady my mom hired to help clean house. She had applied for a catalog credit card and bought a number of things for her home on a no payments, no interest plan on it. She had no idea of how credit worked, and didn’t read the fine print, and had a hefty charge at the end of the period because she didn’t realize she had to pay the balance before that date. My mom spent time explaining to her how credit worked, and hours on the phone with the company trying to come up with a way for the lady to pay it off.
I’ve talked to students who have four cards maxed out, and pay only the minimum each month because… well they are poor students aren’t they? There’s no comprehension of what they are costing themselves by leaving those balances there.
Personnally, I think the companies that make the money need to be responsible, in part, for educating the public. They are the same people who target the sector of the public that isn’t educated, to take advantage of them. Now, I’m all about making money, and I even agree with how the credit card companies and payday loans do it. But I beleive that they should explain their business practices to their clientelle beforehand; then they are not taking advantage of anyone but making that money (reasonably) honestly.
Frugality, on the other hand, is something that is taught in a culture – either at home or in a community. How do you build that? How do you build a community that is *really* interested and involved in educating its children? I sure as heck don’t know, but I think it’s going to have to be a grassroots thing to be effective. Maybe next time it’s not my place to say anything, I’ll open my mouth anyway.
