Let Freedom Count

Today is October 21^st and I just voted early.  What a fantastic idea.  I’ve been traveling a bit recently and wasn’t sure where I’d be on November 2^nd so I was planning on doing the absentee thing.  Lo and behold, it turns out that in Florida you can vote early starting October 18^th at about a dozen places in my county.  No lines.  Piece of cake.

 

If anybody cannot figure out those electronic voting machines, they don’t have any business voting.  I’m dead serious.  You’d have to be a complete moron to screw that up.  But I’m not a big proponent of letting morons vote either.  I don’t think that having a pulse and watching a few campaign ads makes you qualified to choose the leadership of this country.  There ought to be a test to make sure you understand the issues you’re voting on.  Democracy is scary stuff.  Thank God this is a republic.

 

Speaking of democracy, when I was in NYC a couple weeks ago I saw Kerry supporters out on the sidewalks trying to sign everybody up.  My first thought was: “What a waste of time.  Don’t they know that NY is already going to the Democrats?”  My second thought: “Of course they know that.  They’re trying to make sure Kerry wins the popular vote.”  We saw this big push after the 2000 fiasco to do away with the “outdated” Electoral College.  If Kerry wins the popular, but loses the electoral, be prepared for a firestorm of protest.  But I don’t think they have a leg to stand on.  As much as they like to call it “outdated”, the Electoral College is crucial to the foundations of our government.

 

But nobody loses gracefully anymore.  Just look at the last election and the last two Olympics.  I’m sure we’ll see more of it this year.  I read an article yesterday about how Kerry has lawyers waiting in six fueled jets within an hour of each battleground state.  It shouldn’t be like this.

 

The hardest part about voting is figuring out the legalese on those amendments.  I like to think I’m above average and I had to read a couple of those twice before I figured out which side I was on.

 

 

All in the Same Boat

I just started reading All in the Same Boat by Tom Neale a few days ago.  The book is a pragmatic guide to living aboard a cruising sailboat—something that my wife and I have been dreaming of doing for a long time and was a driving factor in our move to Florida. 

 

I picked the book up on a whim several months ago and am just now getting to it.  Tom used to write a column for a sailing magazine that I subscribe to so I’ve been familiar with his name, but I never really knew anything about him until I read the introduction to the book.

 

Excerpt:

Most of us live restricted lives, but we are seldom sure of who are what is in control.  We do know that it isn’t us.  We have jobs, the main purpose of which is to support other jobs.  Few of these jobs are relevant to our daily well-being, except that they bring in money so we can have things done for use that we could probably do better for ourselves or do without.

…

We are told whether our children can pray; we are told that our children must learn things whether we, as parents, think they are appropriate; we are told that our children must comply with social standards and values established by governmental committees; and we then see that our children haven’t learned the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

 

Blackouts tell it all.  During a blackout, we often can’t get water to drink, we can’t get air into the enclosed structures where we work and live, our stored food thaws and begins to rot, our traffic becomes hopelessly snarled, we can’t get gasoline from the electric pumps, we can’t learn from “the authorities” what to do, and there’s not much that we could do anyway.

 

We are helplessly dependent on a supply system that, with a hiccup, could leave us starving.  What would happen to your family if the convenience store around the corner didn’t have food tomorrow?  What would happen if the large grocery store in the shopping center didn’t open—and the next one down the street?  Do you have enough stores in your house to get by for several days?  Most of us count on being able to go to the grocery store every few days.  We never consider buying for a month or more.  If the supply were disrupted, we would have very little to get us by, and we’d begin to wonder who in the neighborhood might have what we need.

…

The family—the building block of civilization—is nearing extinction.  We rely on outsiders for social training, education, vocational training, and just about everything else.  The outsiders may or may not have the best interests of our children at heart, and they may or may not know what they are talking about.  Families no longer work together for a tangible, common goal.  We seldom gather together for daily family meals, to eat and talk.  Even family gatherings are dominated by lots of people and lots of distractions that that prevent meaningful communication.  Our houses have lots of separate rooms (a measure of our “success”), replete with televisions and computers with Internet hookups to anything and everything outside the home.  Almost nothing in our homes promotes getting together as a family and communicating.  Most of the time we aren’t even in our homes.  And the intelligentsia of our society, in a feeble excuse to justify failure, are now proclaiming in treatises and journals that the family isn’t really important anyway.

…

You can take control of your existence.  You can start doing things for yourself instead of for a “system”.  You can be a family instead of a splintered group.  You can raise your children to understand responsibility, to know self-discipline, and to appreciate real values.  And you can know the children you raise.  You can breathe clean air.  You can see the stars through clear skies.  You can fill your days with adventure, and you can walk on white sands and share beautiful sunsets.  You and your family can go cruising.  But you’ve got to work at it.

 

After reading that introduction I felt I could relate to the author because I share some of the same thoughts.  But that is not what the book is about.  The book is about living on a sailboat, but knowing that part of what is driving me to sea also drove him makes the book that much more real and the dream that much more possible.

 

Postscript

Typing in that excerpt got me all fired up and I continued on a tirade about all the things that are wrong with our society.  I’m not going to post that part (for now) because I think the fourth post is a little early to start foaming at the mouth.  I did not intend for this blog to become a personal soapbox for me to espouse my positions on political, social, and philosophical issues.  It wasn’t long ago that I held opposite positions on many of those issues and I’m not quite sure I want Google indexing and storing that stuff for posterity.

 

Falling Oaks

One of my biggest concerns with all the hurricanes this year has been fear that my oak trees will fall down.  I have two big ones (45-50 years old?) and the way they are positioned on my property there is really only one direction that they can fall and avoid hitting my house (assuming that they fall in the same wind).  Given that a hurricane has changing wind directions, it is entirely possible that they could fall in different winds and either both miss or both hit. 

 

My other complaint about them is that they dump leaves all over the place.  I don’t want to take them out because they look nice and I like the shade (and it’s really expensive to have them removed), but they could probably stand to be thinned out a little.

 

So I’ve had some tree guys out to give me estimates.  They’ve all told me different things, but the common thing they’ve all said is that they can’t do anything to the tree in the back until the power company comes out and trims it back from the lines.

 

I called the power company, but they were understandably busy (this was right after the second hurricane, Frances) and said that they probably wouldn’t get to me until the end of the year.  At this point, Ivan, the third hurricane (and the only one that I boarded up for), is on his way and I’m beginning to worry.  One of the tree guys had shown me some pictures of his work.  “And, oh, by the way, this is the same type of tree as yours and the same type of house construction as yours.”  He shows me a picture of a tree that has fallen and bisected the house.  Thanks buddy.

 

But it seemed there was nothing I could do, and as it turned out Ivan didn’t come nearby (look for another post on hurricane prediction).  But Jeanne, the fourth hurricane, did come near and did knock down one of the trees in the neighborhood and the tree did fall on one of the houses. 

 

Now my neighborhood is older, built back in the 60’s, and all the houses have concrete block walls and cement tile roofs (the rafters are wood, or course).  But they’re pretty darn sturdy-looking.  It took them a few days to get the tree off of the house before we could see what kind of damage they had, but it seems it wasn’t that bad.  The roof was mildly broken and a window was broken too, but the walls looked fine.  It doesn’t necessarily make me feel better, but it sure could have made me feel worse.

 

Yesterday the power company came out and trimmed the tree in the back.  The men wore hard hats, climbed trees, and used chainsaws.  The boys were ecstatic and wore their own hard hats while they watched.  I’m not particularly impressed with their work, but if I can hire people to work on the tree now I’ll be happy.

 

 

 

Blogging by Email

I’ve often wondered, if I were to have a blog, what tools would I use to make entries?

The concept of a blog is (or is supposed to be) that you jot short notes about things as they come to mind. Of course you can make it whatever you want, but my concept is that entries are not quite as granular or stream-of-consciousness as instant messaging, but certainly more spontaneous than going to a website, logging in, and making an entry in an online editor. What if you’re on a plane when you want to make an entry? Type it into a Word document and paste it into the online editor later? Bah. Have a separate application installed on my computer that performs editing and posting functions? Messy.

I should have assumed that there would be a much more elegant solution. Instead, I was pleased to discover it and felt dumb for not recognizing the obviousness of it before. Email.

My blog has an email address that I can send entries to and they are magically posted. The address is private to prevent other folks from posting to it. Email offers me message formatting, offline post writing, automatic synchronization, and easy access to the editor (I have it open all day). I can now write posts as easily as writing email. This is definitely good for the prospects of keeping up with this thing.

Where am I?

Okay, so I have a blog now. What's the big deal? So far it seems terribly simple. I was inspired by my friend Matt.

Now I have something else to waste time doing when I don't feel like working. Another ill-considered foray that I'll gradually lose interest in. And I wonder why I never have time to do the things I really need to be doing.

I'm here out of curiosity. I've never quite caught the necessity of having a blog. It seems like another bit of technological silliness that people go nuts over. Like text messaging and ringtones.

But here I am writing one and there you are reading it. Who are you, by the way and why is this interesting to you? Perhaps I'll stick with it and this will evolve into something meaningful. Perhaps it will simply be a collection of random tidbits. Perhaps I'll say things here that I'll come to regret, like those Usenet posts when I was in college.

Some things I might write about are:

• Why I have stitches in my back right now
• My technology frustrations (Verizon, Bluetooth, iPaq, etc)
• Whatever I'm working on at work
• The silly things my kids do
• Hurricanes
• Home improvement projects
• The results of my hours of inane research
• What I'm reading
• Whatever else comes to mind