A snow-by-snow account

More snow today. Yes. More. Maybe as much as a foot.

Because, you know, we've been light on the white stuff.

Anyway, we are having our floors (not woods!) refinished today. Or at least sanded and given one coat. I'll update throughout the day and probably run this on post as a floors/snow update.

9 a.m UPDATE Well, that didn't take long. I'm heading into the final 30 pages of The Unnamed. Great read. What started out as an oddity is getting very sad. I guess that is what happens when you connect to characters. Anyway, probably be done by the weekend.

9:30 a.m. UPDATE Yes, its still snowing. 6-12 inches predicted. My flooring contractor told me he heard 14 possible.* Everything old is new again.

11 a.m. UPDATE The sanding of the pine floors has the entire house smelling of pine. Wonderful. Not.

Noon UPDATE Still snowing. Floors are sanded. First coat is on them. Floor guy is gone for now.

3 p.m. UPDATE Floors look nice. Still snowing. I think I'm high from all the fumes.

* Ok ok. I'll say it. My wood guy told me he heard it would be 14 inches. There; happy?

Heh, You

I was looking over the list of words I struggle to spell on a consistent basis. Mostly because of a comment from a reader about mispellings and typos (!).

It was then that I realized that most of the words have an "a" followed by the letter "u".

"Eh, You". Get it? Not really much to add. I just noticed it; thought it was funny at a time past my bedtime; and that it would allow me to place a clever headline.

Ok Ok. So not every one of these posts is going to be a deep trip down intellectual lane (obviously). Not every post is an award winner (as I show every time I post).

Goodnight.

To tea, or not to tea

This is a bit tricky.

I'm a Diest/agnostic/atheist. So I don't have a "Lent" to follow.

And my personal life philosophy adhors the idea of self-sacrifice for its own sake. Doing without/abstaining from something is supposed to make you a better person. Though I have to say, I have yet to witness that effect in practice. I'm begining to think more and more that the "satisfied" poor aren't happy because they don't have anything, but because they have a lower level of satisfaction and thus are happy with what they have and thus haven't gone out to get more. Meanwhile, the rich are likely Type Aers who are never happy.

Having said all that, I usually follow "Lent." Partly out of the momentum of having done it so many years, and partly in solidarity with R.

So, to swing this back to the title: I'm mulling the idea of forgoing tea for Lent. I'm typing this - coffee in hand - at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. That's the day the whole thing is supposed to start. And its just before my review, which means I'm both wasting precious time and divided in my thoughts.

Forty days is quite a while. And while it wouldn't be like my last break because I wouldn't be giving up caffiene altogether, it would be 4x longer. But this is a good time for it. I need to make an order anyway, so I can take these 40 days, make an order, and have some celebratory tea on by B-day, which is conveniently close to Easter this year. A true Brester.

I'm undecided and unsure. And yet I'm 99% positive I'm going to do it. And hopefully it will go better than last time I tried something like this.

The death of society by technology has been greatly exaggerated

I'm kinda a contrarian by my nature. I know that.

I wouldn't say I'm cynical, I'm actually pretty trusting. Almost to a fault. But I love when the facts and logic of a situation play out differently than the emotion or "common wisdom."

And I usually enjoy shouting it from the rooftops. Which doesn't always make me a great person with which to have a conversation. But I think its what drew me to news and reporting. At least in part. Also, I like to laugh at stupid people.

So, with this in mind, here is another contrarian posting that aims to dispute the "good old days of yore" meme and the idea that the world is falling apart, largely thanks to technology.

- Socrates warned his fellow man against writing (writing!). He thought it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls."
- He also thought (perhaps properly) that children couldn't tell fiction from reality, so he suggested that parents never tell them created stories and rely instead on stories from real life.

Wait, it gets better
- Conrad Gessner warned against the modern world and how it the overwhelmed people with information. He suggested this information overload caused confusion and damage to the mind. He died in 1565.
- A frenchman (0f course, right?) - Malesherbes - warned that getting news from the printed page would isolate readers. It was more uplifting, he thought, to get your news from the pulpit. This is the same newspapers that today are held as bastions of civilized society and whose demise is heralded as the end of the world by some.
- Even schools have been targeted, with some early studies suggesting that organized schooling exhausted children's brains and nervous systems
- Excessive studying was once thought to cause madness.

Its the same, but worse , from there on out. Radio is the dirge of a well-0rdered society ... TV will destroy the nice, wholesome radio-based community ... the internet will crush the wisdom we have all gotten from the TV.

Its worth noting that early worriers thought "Email hurts IQ more than pot." That's a Daily Telegraph headline, not National Enquirer headline.

So, next time someone laments the "shortened attention spans" created by TV, the internet, or the InterGoogle, or whatever is next, keep in mind that no studies show this to be the case. In fact, according to this slate.com article, not only does the evidence not suggest this, it actually suggests the opposite. Technology is making our lives better, with social networking sites providing better better offline social lives and video games allowing players to better absorb inforamtion information without a loss of accuracy.

And don't forget the studies showing that television viewing doesn't have a negative impact on our health. Or our ability to... um, wait, its on the tip of my tongue... if only I had been able to avoid schooling I could probably remem... of yeah, our ability to concentrate.

These fears about the ever increasing media, often fueled by the existing media, are exactly the reason why media isn't implicitly worth saving.

1) We are almost always better off with the new media
2) if the best you've got is "fear this new thing," we are better off without you.

That reminds me of the college acquitance acquaintance who was sure the internet was merely going to be a phase or trend. This was circa 1999, so it wasn't quite as crazy then.

Nah, it was just as crazy then.

Vonnegut short story - Harrison Bergeron

Awesome.

Well, this promises to be a lot more snow

First 28.5 inches Friday/Saturday.
Now another 12-18 Tuesday/Wednesday.

I might have to post (Sim)some pictures, no matter how Click Cliche it is. Do ya get it? No? I'm not surprised. Its an outdated reference and I'm a pretty big stupid cheese ball.

Actually, the snow has come at a fine time. Well, Saturday's snow, anyway.

If you knew what the back half of our house looked like, you probably don't recognize it now, and you really won't in another month or so. Shhhhh! It's a secret....

... Ok, ok, enough with the 10-penny nail-tennis-ball-black-board machine sound already. We ripped out the carpet in the back room, which sorely needed it.

Good news: We discovered largely relatively good condition hard woods.
Bad news: And one area of pretty poor condition, shoddily fixed hardwoods.
Good news: We are removing the floor in the kitchen/foyer to make way for tile
Better news: The tile can extend over the poor condition hardwoods!

So that's where we are. Wood revealed. Linoleum coming up. Tile going down (March 15). Walls in the back room getting a coat of paint.

Well, that was a lot of snow.

I really wish I had some great picture of Duke pounding his way through the snow, or me nearly up to my knees in the stuff digging out. Or our cars nearly entirely covered.

But I don't. And that would be pretty cliche, wouldn't it?

I love walks (A respite from the ordinary)

I'm posting this as a short respite from the usual ranting, somewhat stream of consciousness, often nonsensical crap I usually post. Though its not a deviation from the blog's general meandering course - that's what you get from a conglomeration of 1000 & 1 Things packed into a bag built for 100 & 1 things.

I gotta say, I love walking.
There is just something about it.
The still quietness of it, interrupted only by the scuffling of sole on pavement and sometimes only by the softest whisper of shoe on earth.
The way the exact same space on a walking path changes - almost as if the walking a path itself is doing its own walk - going from the vibrant green of new life to the yellow, gold and brown of mustard, into the drereast of solemn browns and greys and back into the lime green shoots.
One day the sky is an uncapturable blue. The next an inexcusable grey.
I love the way, no matter how many times we've been down that EXACT same path (what must it be now - 70, 100 times?), Duke runs here and there, exploring this and that individual blade of grass as if he's never seen it before. Searching for God, or God knows what.
I love how, despite 70 or 100 trips, the ever-changing path always holds something new for me as well.
I love how Duke never seems so content as it is when we are walking. As if this is the greatest time he could be having.
I love that I feel the same way.
Maybe behind one of the scents he is following is the collected works of the greatest wisdom of all time.
I love how in the spring, the earth smells new and the breeze carries with it a promise of growth
and warmth and makes you want to run - and is that a hint of summer and the shore?
And yet one day, the path will bluster and blister you cold wind.
I love how in the deepest, silentest quiet, your thoughts are loud, and yet its still perfectly quiet.
I love to watch the people.
The runners.
The dog walkers.
The meanderers.
The old ladies.
The friends.
I like how the ground seems hard and safe and concrete, while the sky seems broad and abandoning and limitless.
I love how in 6,000 steps, you can feel as if you've seen the entire world, yet you've only gone 2 miles.
But mostly, I just love the seeing. The walking. The oneness. The aloneness of it all. Even if Duke and R. are right alongside me.

OK.
/CHEESY, embarrasing crap

Damn it! And 2010 was going so well, too.

I said before that I sometimes don't know whether the evidence suggests we are getting closer, or further, from armegeddon (well, actual armegeddon, anyway, the fiscal one is on our doorstep as certainly as I'm taller than 6 feet tall).

Evidence now comes - in the form of a very sad story about the loss of life caused by the war on drugs - that we are in fact closer. Its here.

Considering that I could marijuana in probably 5 minutes, if I really wanted it, and any of the more hard-core drugs in say, 15 minutes, the war on drugs has to be considered a colossal failure.

Add in the loss of lives from absolutely stupid situations like those in the story, and Man In The Sky is it infuriating.

Oh, and adding to my indignation this wonderful Friday is this story of a man who was hit by a car driven by a federal officer while crossing the street. The government was, of course, apologetic: The federal officer didn't declare himself at any point, and based on "eye witness" reports, the victim was cited for "jay walking" - on a different street than the accident occured on.

Oh, and somehow, 20 percent of conservatives apparently say they like socialism.

If my own personal life weren't actually very good and fulfilling... well, its hard to contemplate what my world view would look like in that case.

My day

Wow.

The last two days have been busy, busy, busy at work. I've been slammed with stories to write. Both in number and in size of the stories themselves.

Then, after deadline, I caught word of a $50 million verdict in Pittsburgh. I was the first in the state, nation and world to report on it. Not that its huge news, but its pretty big in the litigation, and it will inevitably be reported by other news sources. Its kinda a nice coup for me.

So I enjoyed Lost and since its been a hellish couple days, so I'm unwinding with a glass of wine.

Peace.