But I'm the smart one, right?

So last night it was miserable in my room.  There was no air conditioning still (it's been about two weeks), the ceiling fans were on, but it was almost 84 degrees with 60% humidity and I really had trouble dealing with it, but finally got to sleep.  The least amount of cloth near me (which is, of course, what I sleep on) was almost too much.

Fast forward to this morning, when I suddenly realise that when we came home last night I utterly forgot to open my window.  So much for skipping first grade, being in a gifted and talented programme, and doing so well in school.  None of that matters if you can't get outside your own head long enough to process sensory evidence and open up a freaking window when you're hot. :)

Well, that was silly

I was going around turning out the lights,  including the star-lights,  which blink,  and after I'd turned those off and set the fish tank to the blue 'moon' light,  there was still this blinking glow,  and I thought,  is there something outside doing that?

Then I did the same in the bedroom,  and there it was again,  this eerie light flashing.  It was then that I finally figured out that it was the Bluetooth indicator on my headphones.  Sigh.  I wonder about myself,  sometimes.  But in my defence,  it's on the back of the headphones,  and I don't notice it,  except apparently in total darkness.

After work today I had a very good therapy session,  spent some time with YKWIA,  and then I came home and worked on an application for a fourth job opening,  and I got the materials hammered out,  so I can apply online tomorrow. I have checked and triple checked my grammar and spelling.  I'd made a couple of mistakes on the UK CV and had decided I had no chance with that one,  but one of my references told me she'd been contacted by them,  so that is a good sign. So there are applications that have been submitted to the state,  UK,  the local community college,  and tomorrow I'll apply to the public library. I think I'm doing what I can, considering we're at five months till  layoff and counting.

Okay,  I'm making bread but I'll let the machine do its thing (it turns off automatically),  I'll sleep for a little over so hour,  take it out,  and then go back to sleep,  then get up early tomorrow and vote.  That's the plan,  anyway,  with an emphasis on the voting part.  At least it's light outside again for awhile. Good night.  And remember to vote!

This is a sad commentary on our society

Endangered baby dolphin dies after swimmers pass it around for selfies

Video footage of last week’s incident shows the animal being scooped up by a man and quickly surrounded by a curious mob eager to touch the animal.

The miniature dolphin, no more than a few feet long, is eventually left to die in the mud, where it can be seen lying motionless.

At no point in the footage does it appear that anyone in the crowd intervened or attempted to return the animal to the water.

These people should be ashamed. Granted, separated from its mother, it might not have survived if it had been put back in the sea, but at least it would have had a better chance than being manhandled by a mob who thought only of themselves and how cool the whole thing was rather than the welfare of a baby animal and left it to die in the mud.

I laughed out loud when I read this

and it captures the ignorance bred by hatred so well. While the current anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim climate is alarming, people need to reminded of the good aspects of Islam and Middle Eastern culture. For example, a good deal of the ancient Greek classics, including much of Aristotle, were preserved in the East and translated into Arabic, before finding their way to Europe through Spain and other channels during the 12th-century Renaissance, and we still study such philosophers as Avicenna and Averroes in philosophy classes today. Christianity has a troubled history of intolerance of its own; I don't judge all Christians by that. There should be no throwing of stones in the name of religion regardless of the parties targeted or doing the destruction. We need to learn to work and live together despite our differences, as we are all human, and all share a home on Mother Earth.



You can follow this link to see various replies back and forth.

If you're not aware of what this was in response to, read: Schoolwork about Islam triggers backlash in Virginia county

A Virginia county closed all of its schools Friday because of intense backlash over a class assignment about Islam, with some parents alleging that their children were being subjected to Muslim indoctrination and educators emphasizing the importance of exposing U.S. students to the world’s fastest-growing religion.

A high school geography teacher in rural Augusta County asked students to try their hand at writing the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith, in Arabic calligraphy. The task, community reaction to it, and a sudden influx of outrage from around the country — including angry emails, phone calls and threats to put the teacher’s head on a stake — led the school district to close rather than risk disruption or violence.

The county, in the Shenandoah valley west of Charlottesville, is the latest to wrestle with how Islam should be portrayed in the classroom and how students should learn about it. It’s a subject that has become increasingly fraught as concerns about Islamophobia have grown alongside fears of extremist violence and terrorism.

Wow, could you be more stupid?

Viral Video Allegedly Shows Kentucky Walmart Workers Tossing iPads

The retailer confirmed that the employees of the Pikeville Walmart involved in a video that went viral on YouTube are no longer employed with the company. Just one of the many problems with Walmart, in my opinion. But wow. Glad I don't shop there (or at any Walmart). On the other hand, I've worked in retail enough to know that there are plenty of guys like this out there, and it's not limited to one company. Fortunately, they don't tend to last long, for the most part, although there are exceptions.

Was that just a senior moment?

You know it's bad when you realise your glasses case isn't in your purse, you wonder why, and where your glasses might be, and then you realise that they're on your face, that you wore them to work today, when you normally wear contacts.

Gee, either I'm tired or I'm losing it. Time for a nap to see.

Never unpack something

at 4 in the morning. You will invariably miss the one part that makes everything work, and feel very stupid after trying to get things to match up without it. Thank goodness for well done diagrammes and a 'spot hidden' roll (a game term) for finally realising there was something hiding in plain sight near the edge of my workspace. At least I didn't break anything.

Is there any point in going back to sleep now?

PS This is especially true if the object in question is a food processor with sharp blades. Fortunately, I did not cut myself.

Good friends

call you the night before you come over (even if it's 1:45 am) to tell you to bring a container for soup to take home, then tut-tut when they realise you're 44 and have just little plastic bowls not worth messing with (I eventually decided on a flour-sized canister that is stoneware, but has a sealed lid and had just a handful of dried lentils left in it that I could put in a baggie and then wash out the canister--not the best solution for the bus, but I'll be careful and make a note to self to buy a stacked set of suitable bowls for the future).

Better friends don't scream at you when, at 2:15, as they're going to bed, you discover that the insulin pen you have still has a needle on it that didn't twist off with the cap last night, that you didn't notice at the time, and you call your friend with medical training back to make sure that what you think will get any air out will (hey, they specifically say in the instructions not to store it that way, and as he surmised, I watched way too many medical shows in the 70s, like Quincy, MD). Fortunately I'm lucky in my choice of friends, who deals with an anxiety-ridden me on a regular basis with the patience of a saint. Although he did tell me to look it up on the Internet to make me feel better and verify, because he knows I'm neurotic, even though I trusted his answer.

I feel dumb. Not stupid. Dumb. For all my medical-librarian knowledge (which admittedly is primarily orthopaedic), and for all that you'd have to have a lot of air in a syringe and probably a bigger needle, my anxiety level rose, because I'm new to this injection stuff and not quite as savvy about things as I could be. I thought I was right to change the needle, tap a bit, and do an air shot or two, and I was, but I needed confirmation from a better source. So I guess when it comes down to it, I'm dumb and anxious.

Thank you to my friend, who like I said, has the patience of a saint. Having boldly injected myself, I'm going back to bed. Good night.

Smacks forehead with hand

So there was one annoying detail about this morning I was having issues with. When I tried to go online and my service was suspended, a message came up saying as much. Unfortunately, even once the service came back up, every time I went to my start page, it would do that, even at times other than when my browser started up. Now, if this were an esoteric site of some sort, that wouldn't be a problem, really. But it was Google. I could get to iGoogle. I could search from my Google search bar. It wasn't the functionality I was necessarily missing. But I couldn't get the actual Google website to come up without that stupid message coming up, and it was just annoying. I tried restarting the computer. I tried restarting the modem. What I didn't think to do was clear the cache. Not at all. My brain was dead. It was an easy fix, but I actually had to call Insight and ask them about it because I didn't think of it on my own. For all that I use Firefox I'm not quite as familiar with it as Internet Explorer, although I prefer Firefox. And it's even easier to clear the cache in Firefox than IE, in my opinion, and yet, I didn't know how to do it. Thank you, Insight tech, for answering a relatively stupid question. I mean, I wouldn't consider it a stupid question if a patron asked me, because I don't expect them to be tech savvy. I do expect it of myself, though. Oh, well, at least I learned from it and will know next time. Gee.

I so rarely wear my glasses outside

that for just a moment I was mildly disturbed by the fact that everything in the centre of my vision was growing darker than on the periphery. Needless to say, it is very bright outside with the sun and snow, and I have Transitions lenses that grow dark in bright light.

I'm batting a thousand today. I think I'd better go take my medicine. Maybe it'll make me smarter.

Small crisis of stupidity

So it's been over a week since I bought the Norfolk Virginia pine, so I thought I should water it. It never occurred to me (and as a gardener I am ashamed to admit it) that it might come in a pot with a drain hole in it. So I never put a plate or anything under it.

So you can see what's coming next--I take a full glass of water, put it in the pot, and water goes everywhere. The table it's on is an old potting table; It has boards with spaces between it, so of course the water went down--onto my printer and some books, as well as dangerously close to the power strip the tree was plugged into.

I quickly got a towel and a plate before the rest could drain down, hit the printer first, then the books. The plate and the pot don't exactly fit--I'll have to find something else in the long run, which I think I have an idea of--so the tree tried to lean over a couple of times. In the midst of taking things off, I took the flameless candles with their little zen bed of rocks and put it on the closest thing at hand--the open recliner, and then knocked into it when the tree fell over, scattering pebbles everywhere. At this moment a friend called, but I let it ring, picking up pebbles from the carpet.

So now I think I have everything dry, everything set. The candles are out of harm's way in case the tree falls over again, and everything's unplugged.

I am such a klutz, both physically and sometimes mentally. Sigh. Let's see if I can make it to the bus stop without too much trouble.

Insane, and not in a so-crazy-they-let-you-off sort of way

Woman charged in Facebook-feud fatal crash: Rivals for affection of prison inmate were involved in high-speed chase
A woman who had been feuding with another over a man serving time in prison saw her rival as a passenger in another car and started chasing the car madly through Pontiac, Michigan. She had her three-year-old daughter in the car with her. Police clocked the cars going nearly a hundred miles per hour, and before they could intervene, the car being chased ran a red light and crashed into a dump truck, knocking the truck over. The truck's driver is alright, but the driver of the car being chased--who had nothing to do with the feud--was killed, and the passenger was critically injured. The woman who instigated the chase is being held on charges of second-degree murder, assault with intent to do great bodily harm and child abuse.

This is just crazy, and over some loser in prison that neither woman could be with anyway. I hope they throw the book at her; she doesn't need to be out on the streets and she certainly doesn't need to have custody of her daughter.

Thanks to YKWIA for telling me about it.

Dear Gods, what stupidity (not to mention anti-Semitic and just plain wrong)

US high school ends 'Beat the Jew' game

Seven seniors at a Southern California high school were facing disciplinary action for participating in a game called "Beat the Jew" in which losers were subjected to "incineration" or "enslavement," a school administrator said Friday.

The game involved some students playing the role of Nazis who blindfolded and dropped off other students playing Jews who must find their way back to the campus, said Sherry Johnstone, assistant superintendent of personnel for Desert Sands Unified School District.

It was not immediately clear exactly if or how losing players were punished, she said.

I am under orders

from Brandon to not think of the additional $930 I owe the state and federal government for 2009 (I did my taxes tonight), but to blog about something interesting for him to read. So first, some humour...

Here's a stupid-criminal story:
Jail me, Elmo? Police: Dad left pot in boy’s bag: He's accused of calling son's school to see if he could retrieve it

Here's a little another odd bit:
Doctor Who regeneration was 'modelled on LSD trips'

"The metaphysical change... is a horrifying experience - an experience in which he relives some of the most unendurable moments of his long life, including the galactic war," it said.

"It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect," the memo added.

In the library world, Will Manley is a columnist who is both lauded and reviled for his perspective. In 1992, he lost his position at the Wilson Library Bulletin for running a sex survey of librarians in his column. Finally, the results are made public:

WILL UNWOUND #78: “The 1992 Librarians and Sex Survey Results” by Will Manley

Just for the record, I would not be among the 38% of female respondents who, if PeeWee Herman were the last man on Earth, have sex to repropagate the species. The human race would just die. Sorry.

On to something more serious. To kick off National Library Week, an op-ed piece by Art Brodsky on the decimation that library budgets are undergoing when they're most needed:

Our Public Library Lifeline Is Fraying. We'll Be Sorry When it Snaps

No less an authority than Keith Richards put it best in his forthcoming autobiography: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

This is sure to cause some strong reactions:

Spanking kids linked to bullying: Report: Physical punishment can lead to aggressive behavior

According to the study, kids who were spanked often were twice as likely as those who weren't spanked to develop aggressive behaviors such as getting into fights, destroying things or being mean to others.

Earlier research had produced similar results, but most had not taken into account how aggressive kids were to begin with, and other factors could have biased the results.

As I don't have kids, I don't feel I can really comment on this too much. I do think that the greater the physical punishment, the more likely the child is to model this behaviour him- or herself.

There's a taste of stuff in my reader, Brandon. Hope you all enjoy.

These guys have no business mucking with education

although if the South Dakota representatives are also representative of their state's education system, then it needs help, indeed--but not from them.

Astrological? Really?

One of my friends firmly believes that your ability to vote should be based on how high a degree you have. I don't go that far, but I would suggest a standard literacy, science, and geography test be given to all political candidates at the state or federal level. Hint: 'I can see Russia from my house!' is not a valid answer.

Ever have one of those days

that is going along lovely until you insert your foot into your mouth several times, get pissy and bitchy, and basically ruin the day?

I did that tonight. I wish I had better control over my mouth and emotions. It was just stupid, and I'm sorry I did it.

(Shakes head sadly)

Breast-feeding, cell-using driver charged: Ohio police cite woman with child endangerment

I'm all for breast-feeding, but going down a road with the child nestled between you and a steering wheel/probable airbag IS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT!!!! The woman, when asked about it, said she didn't want her child to go hungry.

As opposed to a child with its head bashed in from blunt force impact.

I should stop being surprised by stupidity.

Really.

I should.

Don't try this at home

Man hurt as he uses shotgun to remove lug nut

Okay, so I was the one who stabbed myself with a letter opener trying to open up a stapler cartridge. But even I wouldn't try to use a shotgun as a lug wrench. Just so you know. :)

Okay, that's fixed

The cable modem had to be reset. On to blogging...

What is it with all the nooses popping up in the news? Are people really thinking this is a joke? That it's funny? Is it a bunch of copycats because other stories have been in the news? What? Here's what's going on, as detailed in one of the latest stories:

Hangman's Noose Targets Columbia Professor

• A noose is found on the door of a female black professor at the premier education graduate study programme in the country, at Teachers College at Columbia University.
  
  
• There's the highly publicised story of the Jena 6, sparked off by the hanging of nooses in a tree at a high school in Jena, La. (For the record I thought the white students involved with the nooses should have been expelled, not had in-school suspensions, and the black students involved in the beating of a white student should have been charged in juvenile court with assault and battery, or whatever is the equivalent in the Napoleonic system of law in Louisiana). The beating was obviously the most serious offence, though--I'm not sure I agree wholly with the marchers who protested, who seemed to be downplaying the seriousness of the assault on someone whom as far as I could tell from news reports, wasn't connected to the noose incident. Also, I think whenever Al Sharpton gets involved in a case, it becomes more about publicity than the issues. But that's just my opinion.
  
  
• A noose was found in September hanging outside a black cultural studies centre on the University of Maryland campus.
  
  
• Teachers at an elementary school run by Grambling State University decided to explain the Jena 6 story by using nooses on children and re-enacting hangings. Bad idea, although the lesson will probably remain with those kids their entire lives. It's up there with the case in sociology we always studied where they explained Nazism to elementary kids by sanctioning and treating children differently based on eye colour over the course of several days. Psychological manipulation of students isn't really encouraged these days, especially among the very young.
  
  
• At a high school at Gallaudet University seven students (including one who was black) assaulted a black student and scrawled "KKK" and swastikas all over his body with a marker.
  
  
• At the Coast Guard Academy two small nooses were found inside the sea bag of a black cadet aboard a tall ship.
  
  
• A construction worker at a Home Depot building site in Illinois found a noose made of foam packing material. Later a racial slur was found spray painted on the site.
  

Also, not noose-connected per se, but signs of racial tensions:

• An editor and editorial cartoonist at the Kentucky Kernel at the University of Kentucky apologised after a cartoon linking fraternities and sororities with a slave auction was protested.
  
  
• At a Pennsylvania High School three minority students, one Latino, one black, and one biracial were verbally attacked with racial slurs and wadded up paper was thrown at them outside the school right before classes began. Rumours were rampant that the white students would be bringing guns and staring a riot at the school.

In the multiracial, global sort of world we live in, I'd like to think we'd learnt a thing or two from the past. I'd like to think this is just stupidity in action, or the product of minds who don't get the significance of what they're doing. The most blatant racism I ever encountered (and I grew up primarily in the Deep South) was in a small town in Kansas that didn't have any minorities in it until an Asian family set up a restaurant. A teacher who'd been through the race riots in her native Detroit tried to put a stop to a lot of the jokes and attitudes she heard about blacks. But part of the problem was ignorance because they had never interacted with anyone different from themselves. (Okay, I did also encounter it in California, where I was beaten up and threatened by Latina and black girls, but that might be because I was an insufferable know-it-all with a Louisiana accent rather than my skin colour. But I tell you what--I lost the Southern accent. One incident also comes from something I unwittingly said in admiration that I now recognise was mistaken for a racial slur. In my innocence I complimented a black girl for her athletic ability (see, budding bisexual) and I was in my horsey-girly phase at the time and the only athlete I could think of was a jockey. It never occurred to me that those little plaster men they have in the front yards through much of Kentucky--almost all of which I'd seen were white--were called lawn jockeys and were primarily black. I lived in terror of that girl for weeks and I didn't understand fully what she'd thought I'd said until I was in my 30s and heard someone make the reference.)

Back to my point...nooses, uncool, folks. Use them and expect to be prosecuted or expelled. They're not just an unpleasant symbol, they can be construed as a death threat. I won't say every one is meant to convey that. We don't know all the circumstances to these cases. The professor, for example, is involved in a lawsuit with another party. Was it related to that? A disgruntled student? Someone wanting to stir up controversy--white or black? Who knows?

What is good to see is that there are plenty of people out there who protested these cases, making sure their voices of tolerance were heard. But it also shows that racist ideas still fester, although they may not be so overt to lead to lynchings--the ideas are still there. I only hope they will not explode to violence after all that simmering, especially as we become a society with more 'minorities' than the supposed majority. If you listen to whites, they feel marginalised and as if their culture is being pushed aside for everyone else's. In some ways that's true, in others it isn't. But something's going to give.

And compromise isn't always the way to take it, even though we may want to walk a moderate path. Look at the tensions between Turkey and the US over the Armenian issue. There are those who say there should be no resolution on the Armenian genocide--and make no mistake, by the definitions created the 20th century in the wake of the Nazis and other forms of 'racial cleansings', it was, indeed, genocide--because it will affect Middle Eastern peace. The Armenian question is also a sticking point with Turkey and the European Union.

The thing is, though, while we shouldn't necessarily be blamed with what our forebears did, we need to recognise that it happened. The Germans were complicitous with the attempted extermination of the Jews. Serbs tried to eradicate Croats. The Khmer Rouge killed many Cambodians. And Europeans both decimated the American Indian population and bought and sold (and in some cases, killed) people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves from Africa. The US put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, saying they'd collaborate with the enemy. Likewise, the Turks displaced and massacred the Armenians, saying they were aiding the Russians during WWI. History has known this for years. The West was aware of it at the time it was happening--like so many other genocides. But the Turkish government continues the denial.

Racial matters are never (no pun intended) merely black or white. They're messy and complicated. But if we work together, maybe we can make things a little better for our children, and their children.

I really screwed myself over

I tried to cancel my gym membership today at Gold's Gym. I don't go and it's money I could be using more efficiently. I don't normally have time (ironically I do now because I have a broken foot and haven't been working at the gas station, but of course I can't work out much either since I have a broken foot, not to mention it's hard to pay for since I'm not working both jobs.)

Anyway, I couldn't cancel. I thought I'd signed a contract for a year ending in July. I in fact signed a contract for three years (36 months in small print). The only way out is if I move 25 miles or more from a gym. Argh! But I have only myself to blame; I didn't look at the contract closely enough and was just really stupid. And the dues are going up $5 a month in October, according to a sign at the front desk. Bummer.

So I thought, well, maybe I can get the one-time allowable three-month medical stay due to my foot (you have to have a doctor sign it). But you still get charged; they just tack the extra months on at the end.

Needless to say, it was a fruitless endeavour. I was already annoyed that 1) you couldn't just cancel over the phone, but had to come down, sign paperwork, and then it would go through in about 30 days. I was also annoyed that the medical leave form was not on the website (and I checked both the corporate and the one for this particular franchise) like I was told. Again, I had to come down in person.

Moral of the story: read everything you sign. In the meantime, I guess I will be heading back to the gym once I'm able. I do need to lose weight, work on toning up, and I'm paying for it already.