Iowa does good

A while back I posted on the subject of so-called "gay marriage." Shortly after posting that, I got involved in an email conversation with fellow St. Olaf College alumni in which I expanded on my thoughts. Today upon receiving a news alert from a friend that Iowa has joined the ranks of sensible states who are choosing to protect economic and legal fairness for all its citizens, I am prompted to post my email here:

14 November 2006

I agree with almost everything said so far, in particular the fact that it's heartening to be reading this conversation [on a St. Olaf College LISTSERV]. I found it especially heartening for it to have been started by Pastor Benson. The public perception of this issue seems to be far too slanted in the direction of "religious leaders object to gay marriage." It doesn't seem necessary rehearse the various reasons for that here; instead I'll add my thanks to him and all who have replied.

I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or not. Sometimes I'm optimistic; I think the fact that so many people are talking about it--and so many people, so reasonably--is a sign of tremendous progress since, for example, when I was at St Olaf in the 1980s. The fledgling GLBT community's hottest topic then was whether it was safe to be "out," at St Olaf or elsewhere. This feels like progress.

Sometimes I view it historically in a different way: the institution of marriage has hardly been static for more than a few generations, let alone throughout history, and I'm not sure that its present definition is one that's going to last much longer anyway. More than a few progressive thinkers have suggested that nontraditional couples are in fact privileged by lack of access to traditional marriage, because they are both free and obligated to explore for themselves what they mean by committing to each other. I'm not sure it's a fair trade, but it seems like a valid point.

Sometimes I'm pessimistic and think we're weaving our handbaskets with so much damage already done by the misguided fights going on at the constitutional level.

Most of the time, I take a pragmatic view, or maybe it's denial: I think it's an issue that's getting way too much airtime relative to more serious problems in our country and world, and I resent the fact that conservative extremists (read "bigots") are so happy to exploit this as a wedge issue, but I just don't see it as being nearly as pressing as the lack of universal health care, decent education, and a zillion other things that our politicians SHOULD be spending their time on first.

I wrote at greater length on the subject recently in a blog post, which you can find here:
http://erinvang.blogspot.com/2006/08/im-sick-of-so-called-gay-marriage.html

The gist of that post was to propose that we separate marriage and civil union into two separate institutions. What I didn't address is this: what are we all supposed to do in the meantime?

I have the great happiness of being "engaged" (or whatever) to a wonderful woman, and we plan to be "married" (or whatever) in January 2008, but I'll be darned if I know how we're going to do it.

We set a distant date in part so that we have time to talk to lawyers and financial planners and whoever else about how to go about creating a partnership with as many of the dimensions currently available to "married" couples as possible, given the patchwork of simple and domestic partnership options available to us. And then there's all the questions around which laws will end up taking precedence over the others. Any legal experts out there want to help us? [Followup: we didn't get any offers from lawyers, but I did receive an astonishing number of thoughtful, supportive replies from friends and strangers alike.]

We also have a pile of questions about what kind of ceremony to create with what kind of officiant(s), since the traditional options aren't available to us, but none of that seems as important as figuring out how to protect each other and make ourselves accountable to each other financially and legally in all the myriad ways that straight couples get for the price of a marriage license.

MacArthur Maze fallout

As threatened in earlier posts about the collapse of the MacArthur Maze, I did indeed get back into the motorcycling game, so here is an overdue picture of the new baby, a 2002 Honda VFR 800FIA. Candy was reluctant to pose with me, perhaps miffed that we can't seem to find her a helmet that fits.

In lay terms, it's an 800cc Interceptor sportbike with fuel injection and antilock brakes. It's by far the most modern bike I've ever ridden. No choke! A fuel gauge! A clock! ABS! VTEC! What do all these things mean in practical terms?

No choke means one less step while starting the bike. It means no hassles with having to fiddle with the choke level until you can coax the bike into starting. It means not having to remember to turn the choke back down after the bike has warmed up (about a mile from home). It means not having to fiddle with the choke during the first mile to get the mixture just rich enough but not too rich. It means a little lever isn't in the way of your left thumb when you're whacking the headlights' low/high beam switch.

A fuel guage means that you can keep track of how much fuel you have. Big deal? Well, in all the other bikes I've had, there was no fuel gauge. Instead, you had a two-part fuel intake from the tank. Most of the time, you operate the bike with the fuel dial in the main position, and fuel ran into a hose positioned too high to catch the bottom 1/8th of the tank. At some point, the fuel fell below this intake, the engine started to sputter, the rider started to panic (especially if executing traffic maneuvers), and the rider eventually recognized the behavior as a symptom of low fuel, took her left hand off the grip and clutch lever (after completing a shift, if applicable), grabbed for the dial under her left knee, tried to move it to the bottom "reserve" position while wearing gloves and continuing to maneuver in traffic, and then waited for fuel to make its way from the secondary intake at the lowest point of the tankbottom, down the hose, and into the engine, which would then give one last sputter and start running smoothly again. That's if all went well. If instead you were confused or clumsy too long, the engine killed, and you had to restart it (perhaps after pulling over, figuring out what just happened, and then waiting for gravity to draw fuel through the hose since the killed engine wasn't exerting any suck). You then knew you had about 15 miles (more or less, depending on the bike, the slope, etc.) to get to a gas station, fill the tank, and if you're smart, return the fuel dial to the regular position. If you forgot and left it on "reserve," you were at risk of running out of gas with no warning, no reserve, and no hope of getting to a gas station. Ask me how I know. Ask any rider how she knows. Having a fuel gauge is so much nicer! Now I just need to remember to glance at it now and again. Ask Mom how I forgot to do that in North Dakota in my rental car a few months ago and she had to drive five miles from her hotel with a red plastic tank of gas to get me going again. Ask me how embarrassing it is to have to ask your senior citizen mother to rescue you five miles from town. No, don't.

A clock means you actually know what time it is while you're riding, without having to pull over or else attempt to shove your zipped-tight leather jacket sleeve up, your long leather glove gauntlet down, and look at a wrist watch while riding. It's sort of a two-handed operation, and for the most part you only have half a hand available for ancillary tasks while riding. You can get little throttle clamps, which are a sort of lame substitute for cruise control, but the one I had didn't work very well, and it's not hard to think of why these devices aren't the safest things to be using. Suppose you have one, though. You can, in fact, ride no-handed, just like on a bicycle, but it doesn't feel good--at least not to this wimpy excuse for a motorcyclist.

ABS's benefits should be obvious to anyone who's ever used anti-lock brakes in any kind of vehicle. Basically, they're the difference between hitting something and stopping quickly enough to avoid hitting something, especially on wet, icy, or gravelly surfaces. In a car this means saving money by avoiding rear-end collisions. On a motorcycle, this means saving your ass by avoiding all kinds of collisions, spinouts, and lockups. The problem with braking (without ABS) on a motorcycle is that if you lock up a wheel, you have problems. If you lock up the rear wheel (easy to do, since the rear brake is operated by your right foot, and our legs are stronger than we usually realize), it fishtails behind you, and if you're skilled, you can ease up on it and recover; if you're not, you'll go down. If you lock up the front wheel, which is harder since you operate it with your right hand and because front brakes are ridiculously effective on bikes, then the rear part of the bike flips around or over the front part, the bike goes down, and you go flying. I've only done this once, on my old Hawk GT, while deciding to test full-effort braking at a stop sign, not realizing that it had started to mist, the pavement was wet, and I was approaching an oily spot. Everything was fine until the last inches (literally) of my stop, when the front wheel slipped, the brake locked it, and the bike ever so gently bucked me off. It wasn't a big deal of an accident at all--1 mph, no traffic around me, no damage to the bike--but I caught myself with my right hand, bent my fingers back HARD. I got back on, rode the rest of the way home, and then my hand started to throb. A lot of ice, vicodin, two doctors, an NP, and an X-ray later, I had a broken finger diagnosed. (The prescription? Use it as much as you can stand. Use ice and pain killers as needed.) Having ABS means this accident, minor though it was, wouldn't have happened. It shortens stopping distance by astonishing amounts (say 40%) on wet pavement. It can slightly lengthen stopping distance on ideal road conditions, but only if you're a much more skilled rider than I am. ABS is good. I'll never buy another vehicle of any kind without ABS, and I get annoyed when rental cars don't have it. It should be required by law, just like airbags and seatbelts.

VTEC's benefits are the most esoteric, but in the age of global warming, they're not trivial. (A motorcyclist getting green seems weird to you? C'mon--this bike gets 54 mpg, which is on average better than your Prius, took far less energy and resources to produce than your Prius, will last two or three times as long, will take far less energy and resources to destroy when it's dead, will consume far less parking space and the materials and energy it takes to create parking spaces, and will never need huge batteries replaced and the old ones destroyed like your Prius. And ALL of Honda's vehicles have the best fuel economy in their class, and they don't even make the most egregious monster vehicles. Your Prius might get great mileage, but when you buy a Toyota vehicle, you're underwriting all those massive SUVs and trucks that Toyota also sells. If you think I'm a Honda bigot, you're right.) VTEC means that of the four cylinders on this bike, only two of them are firing under light loads. When the load increases enough (around the speed limit or during wicked acceleration), the other two cylinders kick in. That's right--this is a four-cylinder bike, but most of the time it's acting like a two-cylinder bike. Pretty cool.

In addition to being an ecology nut, I'm a safety nut. That might seem weird, too, but as much as I like motorcycling, I like my life better. So here's my hi-viz puke-yellow Aerostich Roadcrafter suit. I suppose some people might like this color, but it's not my favorite, and it certainly doesn't coordinate all that well with my red bike. But did you know that red is almost invisible to people, especially at night? This color is wicked visible always. To make sure, I asked Victoria to take a few pictures of it at night.

In the first picture, I'm standing in the low light of a distant driveway light. In the next three, that light has gone off, and the flash is doing its best. Can you find the black lab in these three pictures? Probably not. But would you miss seeing me if we were out playing in traffic together? Not a chance.

More joys of working from home

The kitty-bjorn takes a new form, and my newest boss gives me my marching orders.

Unlikely friends?

Syltetøy, the young Siamese kitten we adopted in July, refuses to be intimidated by Candy, our ten-year-old black lab. In fact, they seem to be good friends. The other night, V and I were on the couch with Candy and Gjetost. Syltetøy wandered up, and I invited her to join us. She hopped up into the space in front of Candy and then settled down on her rear legs. Candy gave her a sniff, she sniffed back, and there they cuddled for the next ten minutes or so, until it was time for Syltetøy to get up and do some more of her important kitten work.

My favorite story, though, is from July, when we were staying with Jane. Syltetøy's first vet visit revealed a yeast infection in her right ear. Sound familiar? Perhaps because Candy gets aural yeast infections all the time. It's pretty routine for us to have to squirt Epi-Otic ear cleanser into Candy's ears, let her shake it out, and then swab out the goop with a cotton pad. She hates it, and she invariably splatters us with the "fresh green apple!"-scented stuff, so we hate it, too. Imagine my joy when I learned I'd have to be doing the same thing to the wee kitty! It quickly became a favorite activity, though. See, Candy is so familiar with this procedure that when she smells Epi-Otic, she has a reflexive licking reaction; her job is to get rid of the stuff, after all! So after I squirted the stuff into the squirt's ear, the squirt shook furiously to get it out, spattering me even more efficiently than Candy does, and then Candy kicked into action licking it off Syltetøy's head. At first, the kitty was too startled to defend herself; then, she realized it was kind of nice, and she relaxed in my arms and enjoyed the maternal ministrations of the enormous black mama-kitty. Over the next couple days, she bonded even more with Candy, and eventually made her her plaything. Now sometimes Candy's wagging tail is Syltetøy's favorite toy--she bats at it just like a cat-dancer (those floppy wire thingies with the wad of cardboard that twitches spasmodically when whapped).

Recently I drained the juice from a can of tuna into Candy's food dish, and Syltetøy was determined to get her share. This time I had a camera ready to capture the fun!

So you think you want hardwood?

We made that mistake, too, and here's the first installment of pictures and a heap of words to document the drama.

We've been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more white oak hardwood flooring (to match what Jon put in the music room, to match what was already there in the dining room) in the living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway. After that we planned to replace the carpeting in the three bedrooms. As much as we like hardwood, we both liked the idea of carpeting in the bedroom, mainly because putting bare feet down on kitty litter crumbs in the middle of the night is nobody's idea of a good time.

About a month later, we decided to go with the bid from Victoria's friend's company, and we scheduled the job. It was to start Wednesday, 11 July 2007, and finish up sometime around the next weekend, 21-22Jul. We were pretty much going to have to move out of the house once the finishing work began, since we wouldn't be able to walk on anything between our bedroom and the front door. The first step was to take delivery of the wood on Monday, 9 July.

On Sunday, 8 July, we were reading the New York Times and drinking (apparently way too much) coffee when we realized we were being idiots. We're replacing carpeting that's less than ten years old not just because we like hardwood better (who doesn't?), but because our carpeting looked like hell. Eight years of hairballs, boy cat expressions of antisocial sentiment through the urethra, puppy incontinence, dog barf, wine spills, food spills, and all manner of whatever comes into the house on the undersides of paws, shoes, and boots had pretty much trashed our carpeting--which, again, had never looked too great to begin with.

Also, a few months ago, we'd begun sliding down that slippery slope known as Oriental Rugs. Our friends Jon and Kyla (yes, Jon the artist behind my kitchen) threw a "rug party," where a friend of his from Turkey was showing literally hundreds of Turkish rugs of all styles, eras, sizes, and prices. They live in the Russian River now, in the tiny village of Monte Rio, and Victoria and I went up for the weekend. It was a chance to catch up with friends over great wine and food, and the next day on the way back, we'd pick up a mess of oysters in Tomales Bay and fresh cider in Graton. Our black lab, Candy, would have a chance to cavort with their labradoodle, Sam. I'd play a kiddie concert with the Marin Symphony on the way home. We'd have big fun. We'd do everything but buy rugs.

Right.

We forgot that part.

We drove home with four new (to us) Turkish rugs. One huge one had particularly caught both our eyes as being a good candidate for the living room--it was the usually hodgepodge of a million colors, especially reddish ones, that you expect, but its background was sort of pistachioesque somehow. We also liked a slightly smaller one that came off as purplish, and similar purplish medium one. Then we noticed a runner of unusual design that would be good for the hallway to our office after we do that remodeling job (which will be a subject for a future blogging, once we get around to doing it). While we were taking a closer look at these, trying to decide whether we'd buy any, Candy plopped herself resolutely down on the mediumish purplish one and refused to budge, clearly expressing her wish that we purchase it for her. (She was to have a tumor surgically removed the following week, and Dad speculated that she was picking out her own get well present.)

We left with all four.

So, back to our coffee that fine Sunday morning... We were having to completely move out of our house anyway, and did we really want to move out of each of the bedrooms AGAIN to have carpeting put in? Our hardwood and tiled floors all look fine. Our carpeted floors all look horrible. Why, exactly, did we think that the prosective new carpeting in the bedrooms was going to fare any better? Wouldn't those nice, cleanable Turkish rugs be a better idea? Wouldn't it be better to do the whole darned house while we were at it?

Well, of course it would be!

So we call our friend Jane to announce that we're moving in for at least two weeks ("Is Tuesday good for you?"), we do what we can that day to finish moving out of the living room, boxing up all our books and CDs and so on. Monday, Erin welcomes the first big load of wood, which the guys load into the music room. Victoria calls Allison at The Floor Show to ask if she can deal with our sudden scope creep. After work, Erin goes off to play chamber music for four hours (octets featuring a clarinetist who's visiting from Italy). V hears back from Allison: the answer is "probably... I'll look at it first thing tomorrow... and can we start tomorrow instead of Wednesday?"

Yipes! V goes off to get another heap of boxes, including five wardrobe boxes for the three huge closets we suddenly might need to empty out. We meet back at the house to panic. Who wouldn't? It's Monday night. I prepare the stereo/TV cart for moving, which is to say I unplug about a thousand cables and jam them all into a box, and then I get Victoria to help me move the BATV (which stands for Big Ass TV, of course) down to the office where it will be least vulnerable to clumsy movers and floor workers. Except that when we get to the top of the little living room staircase, V trips on the hardwood that's stacked in the music room, falls, lands on her wrist, and (we learn Wednesday) breaks it. We leave the TV there at the top of the stairs for the movers to deal with tomorrow.

Now we're panicked and half crippled. Great. We have to move everything we own by tomorrow, maybe, we've barely started, and I've broken my girlfriend?! Not good.

V takes half a pound of ibuprofen, straps on an icepack, and soldiers on. We jam clothes into the wardrobe boxes. The nice guy at U-Haul has kindly sent closet rod thingies that are about half as wide as the boxes, so I improvise and use the dowels from our closets instead. We set out the stuff we think we need to take with us to Jane's house, and then we collapse in bed.

Tuesday dawns early, with Allison arriving at 9 to look over the new turf. Tim arrives shortly after that and starts demoing the living room, and our mover guys Manuel and Juan arrive a few minutes later and just barely get our furniture out of the living room before Tim starts wailing on the carpet. V and I are simultaneously directing the movers ("Your mission is to fit everything we own into the dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and maybe a deck or two. Go!"), answering Allison's questions, jamming more of our bedroom stuff into boxes, and continuing to panic. Allison sees that we're both wrecks and advises waiting with the bedrooms. I propose that we move everything we can fit into the space available, prioritizing the master bedroom, and if we have to, we'll have the rest done after we move back in. Allison shrugs and agrees, asks us to let her know how far we get, and flees to safety. We put the cats in the safety of their carriers, and we usher Candy into the office so she won't help quite so much.

About four hours later, V and I have somehow boxed everything in the entire upstairs, and Manuel and Juan have somehow crammed it all into the bathroms, the tiny deck off the master bathroom, the larger deck in front of the master bedroom, the hallway leading to the office, and the dining room. Well, heck! We didn't even start using the kitchen! We could have done the office, too! (But that's to be another story for the future.) We call Allison and declare victory, run out for burritos, and then move to Jane's in Sausalito. Since V's wrist is throbbing, she can't drive, so we have to cram two adults, four critters, and everything we need into my car.

As soon as we've unpacked for our two (or will it be three now?) weeks at Jane's, I need to put on pit black, grab my horn, and turn right back around for the night's opera. I drive to Oakland, buy self-adhesive wrapping tape for V's wrist, grab something to eat, and meet my carpool to Walnut Creek. After the opera, I drop off my carpool, drive up to the house, and get my office stuff. I work from home, and for the next few weeks I'll be working from Jane's home, which means I need to take everything I need to her house. Fortunately, I travel so much that packing for a few weeks of work from a remote location isn't much harder than unplugging my laptop and throwing it into a briefcase that already has everything else I need. I also take a few minutes to wander through the freakishly empty house and take pictures of all our worldly goods crammed into bathrooms.

The rest of that week is surreal. V can't drive, so she can't get to work in Berkeley, and she's pretty much at my mercy. Wednesday morning I worked in the morning, and that afternoon, we drove to Berkeley so V could go to the ER to get her wrist checked out, and I went to buy groceries and check on things at the house. She learns that she's broken it, and she emerges from the hospital with her arm splinted and in a sling. We stop by a medical supply place to get a wrist-shaped ice pack and drive "home." Thursday I have an all-day business trip to San Jose, returning home at 9pm to a very frustrated V--my poor extravert has been home all day with nothing but furry critters for company. Friday, we make a trip to an orthopedist, where she's put in a cast; happily, though, now she can drive, so we go to the house to look around and get her car, and she drives "home." I plug my laptop in at my home office and work for the afternoon, amidst the chaos of sawing and banging, and that night I play another opera. Somewhere in all that, we also measured our closets and got to work figuring out how we'd refit them after we move back in: the stupid planks that currently support the shelving and rods will need to be removed to put the hardwood in, and we see no point in putting them back.

We recover over the weekend. Jane has fled to Seattle for a family baby shower. We spend Saturday touring closet stores, settle on an Elfa system from The Container Store, and spend a bunch of the day designing it, and then our friend Rhett comes over for a dog walk and dinner. Sunday I run off to yet another opera while V holds down the home front.

Week 2 is a little less surreal. Able to drive again, V returns to her usual work schedule. I play the last of the operas on Tuesday night. Jane is home and we start hanging out together and getting into the rhythm of our temporary large family. Tranquility is disturbed Wednesday: Gjetost has some kind of horrible mouth infection and needs to see the vet; fortunately, she responds well to a ton of meds (if not to the twice-daily ritual of slurping down more meds).

Weeekend 2, I have a flurry of Saturday errands in the East Bay, including hauling a car full of Elfa closet stuff up into my office; back in Sausalito, Candy takes V on several walks between loads of laundry; Jane is off in Berkeley doing dancerly stuff. Sunday we're the picture of domesticity: the three of us go off to a farmer's market and trap all kinds of great stuff for dinner and come back to work the Sunday NYT crossword. At some point I start getting antsy and make Jane unpack her living room; working together, we managed to complete that job in about an hour, and now it's time to make dinner.

Here we are on Wednesday of Week 3. I'm on day 3 of a nasty cold and feel like crap, but that pales next to our having just resolved a tricky problem: we can't move back in until Saturday. Or maybe Friday. Jane has only one guestroom, and she has a houseguest coming Thursday night, who may or may not be able to deal with cats. Jon and Kyla have invited us to the Monte Rio, but Jon's deathly allergic to our cats. Jane thinks about sending her guest to a hotel, but everything in the area costs a fortune, so we look at moving ourselves into a hotel back in Berkeley. Those cost a fortune, too, of course, and only the really icky ones will take our four critters. Fortunately, Allison decides we can move back Friday, Jane's guest says she loves cats, and we have a Goldbergian itinerary of a solution: Candy and Victoria and I pack up, clean up, and move out to Jon and Kyla's on Thursday afternoon; we stay there Thursday night; Friday morning, we come back for the cats and the rest of our stuff; finally, the whole menagerie drives home to meet the movers Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile back in Oakland, things are looking pretty good! V took some pictures of the floors after their first two coats of polyurethane on Monday night, and they're gorgeous. Even though we have no baseboards and its becoming increasingly clear that we're going to need to paint soon, the house is immeasurably improved by the hardwood. The floor guys were to have put the fourth and final coat of finish on Tuesday, and today and tomorrow they're installing the baseboards, which they had been pre-finishing down on the driveway starting last Friday.

Once our furniture is back in place and all the boxes are sitting in the rooms where they'll need to be unpacked, I'll need to start demoing our closets and installing the Elfa system, so that Victoria can move our clothes back in. I hope we can manage most of this on Friday, because on Saturday I need to pack for a flight Sunday to Salt Lake City. With any luck, my one-armed V will unpack and put away some of our boxes while I'm gone. I'll get home late Thursday night, and Friday we'll welcome a house guest! Fortunately Kathy has been through some remodeling herself, so we think she'll be patient with the boxes and general disorder she's likely to confront.

When we move back in Friday afternoon, the polyurethane will have been curing for only three days and will still be somewhat fragile. This means we need to put down a bunch of rugs to keep gritty shoes from damaging it, and for about seven more days, we have to be really careful. Candy will need to wear dog-boots when she's in the house, or else her claws would make little dents and scratches in the finish, so we've gotten her a spiffy quad of red dog boots at REI and have been having her practice in them on her walks. We think she looks fabulous in her sexy little red shoes, and so do all the neighbors. She's being a good sport about it--almost as good a sport as Jane has been, putting up with our sudden and prolonged invasion--but she has her doubts. Whenever we first put them on her, she doesn't seem to remember how to walk and instead prances uncertainly until she gets distracted by a retrieving dummy or tennis ball. This, of course, had to be captured on video!



All in all, we've had a pretty good experience, and we can't wait to see the results and take a mess of After pictures to post here, but it's been a whirlwind of an adventure, and we're not done yet.

Be a patriot, don't buy fireworks!

It makes me completely nuts to hear fireworks going off around here, living as we do in a neighborhood whose entrances are all prominently marked "CAUTION: FIRE DANGER ZONE. FIRE DANGER TODAY IS !"

What are people thinking?!?!

It was only 15 years ago that hundreds of houses burned and a bunch of people died from a wildfire in the neighborhood started by idiots playing with fire. Not just "those other people" but people we actually know lost their houses, their houses' contents, their lives as they knew them, everything.

It was only a few weeks ago that another big grass fire started in the exact same spot and bloomed into a three-alarm fire and 24 hours with helicopters hovering and fire crews monitoring.

Sure, in theory there are safe ways to play with firecrackers and all those other so-called "amateur" or "family fun" fireworks. I even know most of those safety tips, having misspent some of my youth in this sort of pursuit. I also know that even the safest people have accidents and make mistakes. I'm in that count, too. You have duds that land in the grass instead of going off in air, only to blow a shockingly long time later. You have those whistler things that for some reason crash into the trees or grasses while still lit instead of flying off into the sky. You have just about anything set to go off on a patch of pavement, only to see an unexpected puff of wind whisk it away into a patch of something flammable. Lots of things like this go wrong, and I'm talking about the people who are behaving prudently!

And then there are all the idiots who do stuff with fireworks that is just so darned stupid they deserve to get their fingers blown off or their eyeballs blown up, and unfortunately there are shockingly large numbers of people like that, too.

Regardless of how "safely" people play with them around here, they're not being safe--they're being stupid. In a fire danger zone, it's just plain stupid to seek entertainment with little combustible units.

Nano-opera: Rosenkavalier

Just your basic girl meets girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl edges out guy, girl meets new girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl edges out guy, girl dumps girl, girl marries girl opera. With great music. For four hours.

Might have to rename the printer

This printer has been going by the name "Norton's Napzone" for as long as I've owned it, but the new kitty seems to have claimed it as hers. I might have to rename it "Syltetøy's Bathzone."

The new kitty arrived on Thursday. She is a 10 month old sealpoint Siamese, and her full name is Sigrid Syltetøy Williams Vang. She's got a wee infection in one eye, but it's clearing up nicely. She spent her first several days hiding in the bedroom, but lately she's been prowling around the house and taking up her position in the household. Gudrun Gjetost hisses at her occasionally, but if Syltetøy has claim on a lap, Gjetost just piles right on.

Her kittyhood seems to be serving her well in regard to Candy: it hasn't occurred to her to worry about dogs. She was napping on my lap, and Candy was curled up on the couch next to me. Eventually my lap wasn't wide enough--she unfurled herself full length, depositing paws on Candy's flank. Candy sort of raised an eyebrow but stayed put, and before long Syltetøy was kneading Candy's thigh.

About the name, Syltetøy, pronounced SILT-uh-toy, more or less. Way back in 1999 I spent a few weeks vacationing in Norway with my friend, Lucy, who couldn't get her anglophonic mouth around the sweet brown cheese often eaten for breakfast, gjetost, pronounced YIE-toost, and it became a bit of a joke among us. Later when I was traveling with another friend, Sarah, who'd majored in Norwegian and was now doing graduate work in Oslo, we got to talking about my plan to get a pair of kittens. I'd just lost my two step cats--Barty had died, and Norton had gone with his mom when we broke up. I've always loved sealpoint Siamese, so the plan was to try to find a couple Siamese or Siamese mutts at the SPCA.

What to name them?

"Gjetost!" shouted Sarah.

Mirthful giggles followed. But what to name the other one?

"Well, everybody eats gjetost with jam, so why not Gjetost and Syltetøy?"

A few months later, back at home, Norton came back to me. His mom was opening a new restaurant and working all hours, so she decided he'd be better off in his old house where his stepmom was a lot more available. The courage and generosity of her decision has always impressed me. So, with Norton back in the family, I didn't think there'd be room for two kitties. That spring I met Gjetost at one of the SPCA's mobile adoption clinics and adopted her on the spot. I opted to give her the first name, Gudrun, after my grandmother, so that there would be a name that people in my vet's office could handle, and Gjetost is her middle and daily-use name.

Gjetost will be ten in September. Now, finally, she has her sister, Syltetøy, and during the drive home from her foster home in Vacaville, I realized that her first name had to be Sigrid, after Sigrid Johnson the noted singer and choral conductor at my alma mater, St. Olaf College. Yes, the little dear was rather vocal during the drive, but it's more that she seemed Sigridian.

Gjetost is mostly called Gjetost, or Miss Thing or Cheese Kitty, and Gudrun is pretty much just her medical alias. Syltetøy so far is mostly Syltetøy, but Sigrid, Jam Kitty, and The Little Tyke seem to come into play fairly often, too.

The MacArthur Maze is back in business: Lessons for project managers

Here's something that never happens: the California Dept of Transportation has been working faster than Google! ;-) Traffic has been flowing through the rebuilt sections of the MacArthur Maze for a couple weeks now, but Google Traffic still shows traffic from the Bay Bridge to the East Bay detouring through West Grand Ave:

Google Traffic

Speaking of amazing, the Maze was put back together in less than a month, when most people in the Bay Area including me thought it would take several months to a year. How was this possible? The story teaches several lessons for project managers.

1. Smart chartering. The Governator declared a state of emergency and chartered a rebuilding project the same day as the Maze Meltdown (as we locals have been referring to the disaster). By declaring a state of emergency, the State of California was able to waive literally years worth of red tape in procurement regulations, environmental impact reports, equal opportunity hiring requirements, design requirements, and on and on. They had bids submitted, a winner chosen, and a contract signed the very next day.

2. Smart contracting. California built significant incentives for early completion into the contract: $200K/day. The winning contract was a below-cost bid of $867K. The state estimated it would cost $5.2MM and take 50 days. By completing it over a month ahead of schedule, C.C. Myers' firm earned the maximum bonus of $5MM—a handsome $2.5MM profit over the builder's actual costs—not to mention immeasurable positive publicity.

2. Smart resourcing. Before submitting its bid, the winning firm had made a deal with a steel supplier that included sharing 25% of the profits if the steel could be delivered to spec, on time, for early completion.

3. Smart scheduling. C.C. Myers had workers on the job site 15 minutes before the contracts were signed, and he had crews working 12-hour shifts around the clock.

Another scheduling trick: while the massive steel girders were being manufactured in Arizona, construction work was already underway in Oakland. Normally girders and construction would be in a finish-start relationship, but they did it in parallel, literally in a finish-finish relationship: the last of the concrete was poured right after the last girder arrived.

And another: normally a full batch of girders would be completed and then all shipped together, but to save time on this project, they sent each girder up to Oakland as it was finished, with two drivers in each truck so that they could take turns and drive nonstop.

4. Smart compensation. The firm shares a percentage of profits with all its workers, so the workers all had an incentive to take on the hard work it would take to finish the project quickly.

5. What about risk management? Remember the old project manager's triangle: time, cost, quality. Push one side, another suffers. California prioritized time by allowing higher costs, but did this affect quality? The typical problem with fast-tracking construction projects like this is that often corners get cut and safety suffers. On this point, time will tell. C.C. Myers has an unusually good track record with these kinds of emergency projects, but it's not spotless.

So obviously there's a big risk. According to the Project Manager's Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), a project managers' choices for responding to risk are to avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept it. Let's consider these options for the Maze:

Avoid. The risk is obviously unavoidable; even without time and cost constraints, there is no such thing as perfect, risk-free, overhead highway construction, especially in the land of earthquakes. I don't think avoid was ever an option here.

Transfer. I haven't seen the contract between California and C.C. Myers, but I would be surprised if it didn't have a whole bunch of clauses spelling out C.C. Myers responsibility to repair and redo any defects shown to be its fault. This transfers the cost and responsibility for responding to quality problems from California to C.C. Myers, but is cost really the issue here? No. Lives are the issue: if this highway is unsafe, people could be injured or killed, and the real risk is borne by the citizens of California. So much for transfer.

Mitigate. Again, I imagine there were some contractual provisions to mitigate the State's risk. I imagine they also mitigated some risk by opting to rebuild to the original design, which had stood the test of time and already survived several major earthquakes (this section of the Maze had been undamaged by Loma Prieta in 1989).

Accept. Under the circumstances, probably the only real choice was to accept the risk. Avoiding was impossible, transferring was a limited possibility, and mitigating would have broken the schedule requirements. That leaves accept.

How did they do?

I drove through the rebuilt section twice last week, and I couldn't tell where the repairs had been made. Yesterday I drove through a neighboring stretch of the Maze and could finally recognize the section by its scaffolding and the progress of painting.

More reading for extra credit

Here are some links if you want to read more:

NYTimes article, 2 June 2007

SFChronicle's article mid-construction about C.C. Myers

SFChronicle's Maze Meltdown article roundup

I'm jealous of my suitcase

It's been a busy month for travel. I was on the east coast at my employer's headquarters for a week, then in North Dakota for a friend's graduation from medical school for a long weekend, then home for five whole days, then back east for another week at headquarters last week. I'm home again for two weeks before going back for another week, and this sort of schedule is how I've come to have platinum-butt status with my favorite airline.

I was bummed out not to get home for the long weekend before midnight Friday, but my bag has had an even more exhausting journey. For some reason it went from Raleigh to Dulles to Taipei to Tokyo to Chicago. My guess is that the unusually harried gate agents at RDU got my bag tag and somebody else's mixed up. It was supposed to come to Oakland Sunday night by way of Kansas City and Denver to be delivered 9:30am Monday, and then it was supposed to do that yesterday to be delivered 9:30am today, and now it's supposedly landed from Chicago in Oakland and is going to be delivered late afternoon today. All I can figure is that my bag has been doing its best to enjoy its stays in Taipei, Narita, and Chicago. I know that two of those can be fun places, and I'd sure like to find out about the third.

I really don't think it's fair that my bag gets to go more places than I do. For crying out loud, it's just a stupid Costco wheelie-dealie whose greatest accomplishment to date has been not falling apart. I'm a well-educated and some would even say personable high-tech professional who can offer greetings, thanks, inquiries after the price of an iron chair, and toasts in least a dozen languages! I asked the airlines platinum-butt service rep guy who was updating me on its itinerary whether they would consider compensating me by letting me go on the same itinerary my bag got to go on, since I'm platinum butt and all. He chuckled and said it was not a request he'd ever heard before. Unfortunately, he wouldn't go for it, but he did call back a little while later to say that he'd gotten me a couple 500-mile upgrade certificates. I wonder if he would've gone for Victoria's idea, which is that I should at least earn butt miles for the segments my suitcase has flown without me.

I wonder if they've at least had the decency to supply it with meal vouchers while it was languishing in all those airports.

The really irksome thing about all this is that the only reason I didn't bring it home carry-on was that I'd bought a bottle of mouthwash that was bigger than the one mouthful's worth that I would have been allowed to carry on. Because of course anybody who's ever watched a thriller on TV knows that you can take down a jet with a bottle of mouthwash, a knitting needle, two AA batteries, and a few feet of violin string. Add a laptop and a pair of canvas sneakers, and you can take out a skyscraper, right?

I'm so tired of the "look busy!" mission of the Travel Illusion-of-Safety Administration. Let's get Hillary into the Oval and then ask her to disband the whole charade. If she put together an advisory council of smart six year olds, they could probably design something more effective and sensible than what we have now.