Month: May 2006

I spent six of the first 12 days of this month at two different conferences. While I enjoyed them, it inevitably disrupts the daily rhythm. For instance, I miss news stories, or else, I hear them piecemeal.

One example: the death of Floyd Patterson. He was the first boxer I could identify by name. Additionally, this resonated for me because he was living in my old college town of New Paltz for years and because, like my father, he died from prostate cancer.
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Someone asked me one day last week what I thought of the NSA domestic spying. Ever eloquent, I said, “Huh?” Then it was explained to me. Truth is, it didn’t surprise me all that much. Nor did it surprise me that 2/3s of the American people, according to some poll, thought domestic spying was a good idea. I figure they just didn’t understand the implications, that the spying could be on them.
But then, there was a follow-up question in which 2/3s of Americans wouldn’t mind if their own phone calls were intercepted.
ARE THEY CRAZY?
Do they really want other people to know about that a cyst they had that was found to be malignant, or the bill they didn’t pay because they were a little short? (I was going to write something about a married couple having bicoastal phone “relations”, but didn’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities.)

Someone at one of the conferences told me that Americans were sheep. The context was Iraq. I was willing to play devil’s advocate about people being fooled by misleading/false information from their government. But this one? Bah! Or Baa.

Or am I missing some nuance of this story, besides the “don’t leak our secrets” argument?
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Albany County district attorney David Soares made headlines when he described the failed U.S. drug policy at a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was criticized locally by the mayor and the police union for suggesting that the police were overpaid. But Soares, who took on the Democratic machine and won what many thought was a surprising victory in 2004 had his supporters as well. He apologized for parts of his remarks, but stands by his main point, opposition to the arcane enforcement such as theRockefeller drug laws. (I suppose I should note here that I made a few phone calls on his behalf during the primary campaign, which, in Albany, is generally tantamount to election.)
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I’m troubled. At least some of what the President of Iran said, that 18-page letter generally described as “rambling”, as though that were a bad thing – look at the name of this blog – made some sense to me.
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Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News – seems like a lot of money that won’t translate into better ratings. In fact, the ratings went up when Bob Schieffer “temporarily” replaced Dan Rather for 14 months
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Meredith Viera, new co-host of the Today show – good for her. I liked her going back to her 60 Minutes days.
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Rosie O’Donnell, new co-host of The View – don’t care. Saw some AOL thing about whether the couch will be big enough for her and Star Jones.
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Spanish language national anthem – don’t care. Don’t think it is a substantive issue. Besides, as Greg points out, almost nobody knows the lyrics in English anyway.
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Rush Limbaugh – the fact that he turned himself in to be arrested means he was arrested; that’s not liberal press bias. His sentence seemed reasonable to me – hope others with his problem but without Roy Black as their lawyer get similar treatment.

Carol and I picked our wedding day seven years ago, in part because it was about halfway between my birthday in March and her birthday in July. (I for one never thought about it nearly coinciding with Mother’s Day.) Having been married before, the planning of the event didn’t hold much excitement for me. I mean, I wanted to BE married; it’s just, at some level. I just rather have eloped. But Carol hadn’t been married, and I didn’t want to cheat her out of “her day”.

Most fortunately, my father was, among many of his other skills, an amazingly good designer of weddings and other celebrations. So when Carol and I went down to Charlotte in April 1999, Carol and Dad dealt with color schemes – PLEASE don’t ask me what the color scheme of the wedding was – and decorations for the reception, while I concentrated on what I wanted in the service itself: the Scripture, the music, etc., with Carol’s input.

The wedding was a careful negotiation: one of my new brothers-in-law, John, as one of my groomsmen (hmm – his birthday was yesterday, but he died a couple years back) and I got to use my then eight-year-old niece Alex as the flower girl. Stuff like that.

The event turned out to be bigger than either of us had originally thought, and as I mentioned last year, at a church we longer attend, but all of that is temporal.

Baseball figures into our anniversary this year. I’m going to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh…with my father-in-law. Then he, his wife, and my wife will rendezvous somewhere. She’s been a good sport about this.

Happy anniversary, honey. (Geez, I don’t know why I wrote that’; she STILL doesn’t read the blog.)

It’s Mom’s Day. My mother is the person I know least likely to operate with an agenda. She is overwhelmingly nice. Sometimes TOO nice. A telemarketer calls and she says she’s not interested, and doesn’t understand why he doesn’t then hang up. (Because he still things he can still sell to her as long as she still on the phone.)

My father was the disciplinarian when I was growing up. My mom actually tried to spank me once, but it was a half-hearted effort.

She had a lot of guilt about being a working mom; the correct verbiage now is “a mother working outside the home”, but we’re talking the late 1950s and the 1960s. We would go to her mother’s house at lunch and after school. My grandmother was a strange, paranoid woman who told us about bogeymen, “bad people” and the like in such terrifying detail that both sister Leslie and I tended to believe her, whereas baby sister Marcia saw through the BS.

So, my mom was upset that her children’s minds were being filled with so much rubbish, even a decade after the fact. We tried to assure her not worry, that we were OK, that none of us ended up as mass murders or committed other felonies.

We could really tease my mom. She was not a great cook, and in fact, my father was much better in the kitchen. But she tried. Once, she made something from a recipe she found. It had weird green specks in it that we thought were awful. There was a detergent at the time called Oxydol, which advertised having “green bleaching crystals”, and for years we made reference to this disastrous meal with “green bleaching crystals.”

I think one of my favorite times with my mother was when I was 12 and Leslie was 11. My father smoked at the time, but my mother never has. So we sat at the kitchen table and we all lit up. Then we all coughed our brains out. Neither Leslie nor I ever were smokers.

So, there are some random thoughts about Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.
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Happy birthday, Rocco.

Wow. The work move is today, postponed from yesterday. Probably the last I’ll say about it (lucky you).

If some of it seems a tad cryptic, well, there’s a reason for that.

One of the things that makes transition easier is information. If there had been a real opportunity to ask questions, I would have queried why, when six units were moving to this space, why five of them had been attending meetings for a month, while the sixth was not even informed?

With newer information, I might posit this question: Why are all of the folks moving to the third floor of this new building required to paying parking fees? And being threatened with being fired if they park without paying?
Free parking would have been at least one upside of the move – not for me, but still- yet even that has been dashed. The folks on the fourth floor of the new building (two folks I know from church) and the second floor of this building (a guy from the Bradley birthing class I attended) are not paying, and indeed one of them laughed at the suggestion. Surely, the fact that our folks were paying for parking when they were downtown, where parking is at a premium, oughtn’t impact parking at the CW, where parking is plentiful. Someone had the audacity to suggest to me that those driving are helping to subsidize the move, but that can’t be it. Of course not.

And I’m sure the building people have forbade us from having food at our desks, but it certainly can’t be true that someone has been assigned to check to make sure we don’t have hot plates at our desks, can it? That would suggest that we need to be treated like children, rather than the professionals we are, so I’m sure that’s just an ugly rumor.

And speaking of rumors, I heard that someone has forbidden any signage for individual workspaces, i.e., name plates. That can’t be right. Over 200 people from a half dozen programs going to a place with a standard look and feel would certainly require some differentiation. I have this old name plate from when I was a teller for about a month nearly 30 years ago just waiting to be dusted off.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20001117/REVIEWS/11170306/1023 Sammy

So, in conclusion, my reticence about this particular move does not come merely from:
-not wanting to move
-the inconvenience of where we’re moving to
-the realization that we’re less likely to attract library interns because of our new location
-missing downtown
-my bad memories of the last time I worked at that location
-moving from an office with a door to a cubicle
-moving to a smaller space
-getting an e-mail dated this past Wednesday at 9 pm informing us that when the computer files are migrated at the end of the day yesterday, some of our files are moving into something called the archives, and that we should move said files to another area if we don’t want them stored in the archives – since I was out of time at the time, reading this Thursday at 4 pm, that news was particularly distressing to me
-not being able to listen to music
-having to become one of those clock-watching people who HAS to leave at 5:30, even when I’m in the middle of something
but for those reasons and…others.
Cockalorum http://www.answers.com/topic/cockalorum

Just back from conference #2 of the month. I presented there too.

I had this friend I went to school with from about 2nd to 9th grade named Ray. His mother was the den mother when we were Cub Scouts together. I was in Ray and Pam’s wedding in October 1976. Pam just sent me this newspaper clipping from 1961, which, if you can’t read it, indicates that I was helping with the packing for supplies for a “Negro tent community in Tennesssee”. No doubt that my apparel was my father’s idea.
You may notice that they gave full street addresses for the girl Penny and for me; they don’t do THAT anymore, do they? You will also note that they misspelled my last name as Greene. Even then, I hated it when they screwed up my moniker.
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My friend Judy, who drove me to Boston to be on JEOPARDY! in 1998, is taking the show’s test in NYC tomorrow. Another friend called me to give pointers to a colleague who is also taking the test. They are all Albany librarians, so I wish them the best of luck.