Rusty's Blog

Not sure what tomorrow will bring. Not planning great things I’m afraid.

Past couple of days have left me somewhat short of sleep. As I was driving home this morning I stopped at the gas station, filled up, and picked up a couple of quarts of motor oil, and a couple of quarts of transmission fluid.

Since you want to check and add transmission fluid while the engine is running, and the transmission is warm, I left the car running when I got home and parked. Grabbed a funnel out of the trunk, pulled the transmission dip stick, put in the funnel, and added a quart. As the fluid drained out of the funnel I glanced at the bottle, and realized that things had just gone pretty bad. The fluid I had just poured into the trany was motor oil. Well, synthetic 5-30 motor oil, but definately the wrong stuff to go in. Added the right stuff, but don’t know if I got enough fluid in yet, in any case I’m going to have to drain it all out as soon as possible, and better would be to flush it, drop the pan and check and if necessary replace the transmission filter.

I then add the remaining motor oil to the engine where it was supposed to go, but I expect I will need to add more. When I topped up for gas I checked my mileage since the last fill. I’m getting less than 13 mpg, which is pretty bad for the car. Normally I see between 16 and 19. I’m pretty sure that the combination of the low tranny fluid and low oil have not helped my mileage any at all.

So I then go in. do a quick check, yes I’m going to have to drain the tranny, all kinds of wonderful stuff I really didn’t want to have to do. So I decide I might as well get off that track, do some other writing, and invite a bit of other disaster. And head off to bed. I get to sleep at about 7:30. And promptly open my eyes at 9.

That’s followed up by not being content with putting my foot in my mouth, but firmly planting both feet down my throat in a comment. that I only realize later I did, apologized for, but I still feel pretty bad about my phrasing.

Some good? Well, I hope so. Forwarded a different picture of a friend to them cropped to be specifically them, and all set to go to be used for a profile, or something else. It’s not perfect as the camera was not in focus at the time. Also encountered the online presence of someone I’ve heard of, and whom I have a lot of mutual friends with that I have a lot of respect for, but I don’t know if I’ve ever done so much as nodded in hello to in passing some place. Of course the way my day has been going, I’ve probably insulted her in some completely unforgivable way, and I’ll be regretting it for years to come. I kind of hope not though. Kind of thinking it would be a good balance for the day if things went well. We’ll see.

So, after cleaning up something that’s been annoying me for months, I apparently finally fall asleep. I don’t know what time it was. I do know that I responded to the alarm at 4:00 pm, but wasn’t up. I did wake up at 5:45. Now recall that my schedule is to be at work at 6:00 pm. I normally get to my desk at 5:45 give or take 5 min, and take off for work about 5:00 pm. So the day just got worse. Called my boss, explained that I had just woken up but was on my way, and ended up at my desk at 6:30.

Really kind of wishing I don’t end up dragging my collection of bad fortune into Sunday. If things some of the results of actions Saturday, or this week turn out good, I really would be happy about that. If it doesn’t work out well, I’ll be disappointed, but that happens.

Live, It’s not really all that bad.

I’m not immune from the possibility of job related issues from my public face. Neither are you.

First of all as I write this, I happen to work for Wells Fargo. And while what I do and say may reflect upon Wells Fargo, I have many personal views that are at odds with what some people, perhaps even a majority of people, at Wells Fargo may hold.

From an employee at Wells Fargo’s perspective, I am very happy that the company celebrates diversity the way it does. As it grows as a company, that diversity has given Wells Fargo the flexibility to enter new markets as a result. From an investor’s view, that is one of the reasons that Wells Fargo currently is the second largest financial institution by market cap, as well as the second largest by total deposits. Interestingly enough in those two comparisons 1 and 3 swapped.

From a personal perspective, I am not recommending that you maintain any financial association with Wells Fargo, unless you personally agree with the way the bank is run, and does business. For that matter I think you should take a look at a complete cross section of your opportunities and only bank with those institutions that you happen to agree with. If that means a local credit union, go for it. If that means Bank of America, I’m OK with that too. You should be responsible for where you put your money.

I’m also not going to tell you how to invest. I honestly don’t know what your investment goals are, and couldn’t tell you what the best strategy is to achieve those goals. Honestly even if I had some idea, I don’t know who I would recommend for you. There was a commercial for an investment firm on TV a couple of years back, where a customer was talking with a portfolio manager, and it was clear that the portfolio manager wasn’t sure that the customer knew what risk meant. So he point blank asked “Would you be OK if your investment portfolio lost half of it’s value?” For someone just starting out, that might be OK. On the other hand if you are a year or two from retirement, that might not work out so well. Or you may be more than happy to put a quarter of your portfolio in such a fund, understanding that one possible outcome would be to lose it all, and another could be to quadruple it’s value.

About the only bit of advice I can offer is that which I’m pretty sure most people are aware of. It’s the same bit of advice people get told about everything they value. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread out the risk across multiple investment opportunities. Sure Microsoft would have been a great place to buy stock the day after it went public. Most of us wouldn’t have been able to buy any of the stock the day it went public anyway. But today you might look at the core offerings of what Microsoft is selling, and consider the stock to be a fairly low risk place to put money, and also a place where you shouldn’t expect your money to grow wildly.

You’ll note that I’m not telling you to invest in Wells Fargo. If you do, you will be amoung many people who’s names you will recognize, but there are also names you’ll recognize that are not on that list. So I certainly wouldn’t recommend specifically investing in Wells Fargo. Do I have money invested in Wells Fargo? Yes. Whether it is a preferred place for my money to be is a different matter. For the moment I plan on keeping between 5 and 10% of my retirement funds in Wells Fargo stock. But you don’t have to. And I would honestly say that putting more than 10% of your retirement fund into any specific stock is probably not a good idea. For a short term holding when you believe the stock will grow significantly, you might put that much, or more in it, but not for the long term.

First bit of advice, find a real financial advisor to work with. That’s not me.

And that’s part of the problem with working for a company, and having a public image on the Internet. There are people who know and trust my recommendations. I don’t know how many there are, but the reason they trust my writing is that I’m not writing as a public face of Wells Fargo, or for the companies I worked for before Wells Fargo. I’m not telling people to jo sign up for jobs at Wells Fargo. If you’re interested, you’re best option is to see what’s posted. If you don’t know, the starting point is the wellsfargo.com home page, and their is a ‘jobs’ link there. If you’re not, that’s OK too.

And so it goes.

But the real point I want to make is that I write about a fairly large variety of topics, some of which are going to be very uncomfortable for potential employers. I’m not going to appologize to them for that. It’s my personal life, and asside from the fact that my personal life involves the same person as my professional life, they generally don’t have a significant overlap. I’m not writing about the latest in networking technology that I’m playing with at work, or learning for work. Office politics have no place in my personal life, and my personal life is not something I generally involve people at work with. If something happens where there becomes an overlap, perhaps I meet someone at work and we hit it off and things go great and we both have a personal life together that situation will have to be addressed by both of us.

So why all the rhetoric? It turns out that there are a lot of companies that are looking at the personal presentation people have on the Internet, and making hiring decisions based on that. Some companies are looking for things like number of friends on social websites as a sign of the prospective employee’s ability to work with others. Likewise a quick look at the pictures they post or have posted of themselves is an indication of how aware of what they are presenting they are, and whether that presentation is something they want to hire. Lots of pictures of the prospect drunk and half naked? While most of us have been there, it’s not something we felt it necessary to put someplace where just anyone could see them. Granted it wasn’t quite as easy to put those pictures out there for many of us.

Something else that comes up is the ‘what is your opinion on…?’ questions. Most of us have learned over time that our opinions change. The solid agnostic finds God in one or more of it’s myriad forms. The staunch conservative realizes that sometimes people need a bit of help and becomes a social liberal, perhaps while staying a conservative businessman. The card carrying democrat becomes disillusioned with the party and realizes that she now has a different view on politics. The social maven ends up isolated for weeks or months in some accident, and comes out of the situation unable to trust others without knowing why.

I’ve had an on line presence of one sort or another since 1988. I’d like to think that most of it reflects a person who is curious about technology and people, psychology and physiology. I’m sure that it shows a person who’s seen some rough days, and some better ones. I’m absolutely certain that some of what is out there is stuff that I no longer agree with. Either because I’ve learned better, or because it was true then, but is not now.

I’ve also written some stuff that has probably cost me either real friends, or potential friends, who have looked at my views and decided that they couldn’t accept those views in a friend. And honestly, losing friends that way doesn’t make me upset. This world contains a very wide variety of people and some are just not right for each other.

That also applies to potential employers. I don’t expect that I would be a good fit for a large number of employers. And that number will probably grow if they take into consideration my personality as presented on the Internet. And honestly I’m OK with that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for me to deal with if that eventuality happens. I’ll probably be a bit upset about it then. But as I stated, my views are subject to change.

…and realized I was in the midst of a major change in my life.

I wasn’t looking for my glasses, concerned about how my contact felt. irritated with myself for having slept with my glasses on, thinking I needed to clean some lenses or another.

Several people have talked with me about the fact that getting Lasic or PRK (the procedure I went through) was a life changing experience. I didn’t doubt them in the least, and I’m not saying that this is evidence of that. It’s just that for one of the first times, as I was getting up, I Noticed that I wasn’t doing these things, and had a moment of personal celebration.

Is it something I would do again? Yes. I don’t know how I would go about setting things up differently, but definitely I would do it again.

As a reminder, I started out with a correction difference of about -8 diopters in each eye. Anything beyond about 6″ from my eyes was completely out of focus if I didn’t have glasses or contacts in. I could not read a book without glasses.

Well, OK if I held the book or paper within 6″ I could read, but you then run into parallax issues. Essentially what that means is that I could bring one eye into focus on what I was reading, but the amount of effort to get the other eye to actually look at the same word, and also focus was often impossible. Reading a page involved not just moving the page up for each line, but also moving my face across each line (or the page) as I could not focus on the entire line at once.

No what I have now is not perfect. And there were a few advantages to having vision that worked at such tight quarters as that. An advantage? I could, without a loop, see details in jewelery that many might miss entirely. Of course I had to hold it close to see that, but then so does a jeweler. The thing is, I don’t work in the jewelery business. I don’t buy and sell it, I don’t make jewelery, and I don’t expect to do so any time soon. And beyond that, there isn’t enough of a call for those capabilities.

There is a lot of talk out there about the difference between plain Lasic or PRK and Wavefront enhanced. From what I understand, I did not get Wavefront enhanced. Part of why, at least for my left eye, was that my correction is so strong that the advantages do not outweigh the extra work involved. Additionally it seems that the technology was not able to work with my pupils being as small as they were when they were doing the measurements. Yes they could dilate the eyes, but that does affect several other measurements, including the controls on the laser. It turns out that the laser equipment will abort the procedure if the pupil is dilated too much when it is trying to do it’s work. So for me the result was a straight prk procedure.

Now as to the ‘not exactly perfect.’ I do need reading glasses when looking at small text. I can work around that to some degree on computers. For example the text I’m writing this at my computer with is a 12 point text rather than 10 point. As my eyes heal, I may get some of that near focus back. However I knew going in that near focus would be a problem.

So I have several pairs of reading glasses available to me. and that works well for now. But I’m not putting them on first thing in the morning. Wearing them all day. Completely blind while cleaning them. Soaking them for 8 hours in a protein remover. (Contacts) Making sure that they have been cleaned of the protein remover before putting them in my eye. Perfect? No, but I wasn’t expecting that anyway.

I also have several pairs of glasses specifically for going outside. Sun glasses of course. UV will cause problems with the healing process. But also of concern is dust and stuff in the air. Drying due to a breeze or even the defroster/defogger on the windshield of the car. And so on. So since there is a lot of my life that is spent at night, I also have a couple of pairs of no-tint sunglasses, or safety glasses. I’m a little concerned about mercury vapor lights and florescent lighting, as both emit UV in addition to the light that lets you see about you, but not at the levels that the sun does, at least not unless I suddenly take up an interest in tanning beds and booths. (Which is fairly unlikely I think.)

Life changing? Yes. I’m seriously hoping that it is significantly life improving as well. But that’s another post.

Usually.

Scheduled events. Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and Tuesday next I see my vision care people. At the end of those visits my vision ‘work’ is completed, though I will still have healing to do. That is actually expected to take some 6 months or so. Over a little more than another month I’ll be getting drops in my eye, mostly hourly, though a couple of them will be on reducing schedules.

Next up, and it can start earlier, is to build a firewall. Not your average firewall, but one with a few more features added in. This is almost a commercial grade firewall, but I’ll be using a small form factor box to build it. Firs up it will have something like 4 or more WAN interfaces. I’m not going to be setting up 4 or 5 boxes to service specific IP addresses, especially when the targets are going to be separate boxes within my network. In any case, the standard implementation process will be followed. Design first, test in the production environment.

Isn’t that how everyone really does this? Oh they espouse best practices, ‘design, test in lab, throw serious problems at it in the lab, it will run smoothly in production.’ However what they gloss over is that no matter what they do with testing in the lab, the real world involves situations that they are not prepared to test ahead of time. Two days after they deploy, someone comes up with a hack they hadn’t thought of.

What do I mean about implementing some unusual features? Ok, I’m going to include the ability to manage the network over a secure connection. That includes managing the firewall. And by secure I don’t mean simply that I terminate a vpn on one of the boxes. There may be VPNs traversing my firewalls, but none that will be opened from an outside connection and have the ability to manage the devices in my network. I have a couple of domains that are going to be hosting web pages on standard ports, that are going to be either running on separate boxes, or will be running different server software. Apache is nice for a lot of stuff, but I have a project that looks like a python server will be better for.

Obviously those are also things that need to be hashed out.

Some where in all of this I’m also expecting to take on some new rolls. I’ve a couple of parties to plan out, neither will happen in the next month, but planning needs to happen anyway. I also am going to be working on a couple of conventions.

I explained my ’schedule’ to a friend this weekend, who looked at it and declared that she thought her schedule was complicated, but it was nothing compared to mine. Well, perhaps. The reality is that my schedule really differs from others in that my work week is rotated 12 hours from everyone else, offset by three days, and squeezed by a day. The major complication for me is that my work week eats into what other people think of as a weekend. A minor complication is that if I want to get things done, see doctors, go shopping, I need to find places that keep somewhat odd hours, or rotate the ‘day’ for my weekend.

Even people I work with on other shifts don’t always seem to get the issues. I would love to attend an all hands meeting. However if it is scheduled for 1 pm on Friday, I’m not attending. Friday is the first ‘day’ where I have a serious chance of getting some sleep between full 12 hour work shifts. I can handle the aggravation on a Saturday, and might be able to work something out on a Thursday, but not on a Friday. Of course Friday is the best day for management. Oh well.

Somewhere in the schedule needs to be working out, eating, and hopefully some pleasant social activities. I’m not sure I’m very good at that last, but…

Well, it’s time to have my calendar assembled and ready to ship out for family members. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better.

The source file for generating the calendar takes a bit of work every year. In the output are several different varieties of events. The lunar calendar is maintained separately. Personally I think that should be true for a couple of other sets of data, but it doesn’t quite work that way.

Most of the content is of the variety , month, day, text. I’m not expecting most of that to change from year to year, but there are exceptions.

Holidays get an asterisk ‘*’ after the day. or at least before the text.

Next in complexity is stuff that is related to our trip around the sun, that doesn’t quite fit a month day format. Equinoxes, solstices and meteor showers end up being in the same format as ‘events’ but may change from year to year. For example the vernal equinox was on March 19 in 2009, and will be March 20 in 2010.

Then comes ‘national holidays.’ Not all are actually holidays for all people, but that’s not the worst of it. Holiday’s ‘Observed’ is either the Monday before or closest to a date, or the closest working day. When the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, it is ‘observed’ on the 5th. On a Saturday it is observed on the 3rd. Memorial day is observed on the last Monday of May, and so on.

Every year the Jewish holidays move around, because they are part of the Jewish calendar which is based mostly on the lunar month rather than a solar month. There are additional complications based on the fact that observance of most of them begins at sunset the previous day, which also affects when some of them get set. More on that later.

Worst though is the Christian calendar. The easy ones are Christmas, and All Saints Day. The fall on the same days of the same months every year. Next up come things like the Sundays of Advent.

Easter poses a bit of a problem though. If you grew up going to Sunday school, you probably recall that Christ was crucified on Friday because the Saturday of passover was considered holy by the Jewish faith, and they could not allow him to be hanging on the cross on that day. So Easter Sunday is axiomatically tied to Passover. The rule for deciding when Easter is, is The first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full day of spring. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm on the 19th of March, and the full moon is at 2 pm on the 21st, then Easter would be on the following Sunday. That could be as early as the 29th of March.

Based on that you would expect passover to be observed the same week. Right? Well, not really. Remember that the Jewish set holidays based on sunset rather than midnight. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm, which is after sunset, on the 19th, it is treated as if it happened on the 20th. So the first full day after the vernal equinox is not the 20th, but the 21st. If the full moon happens at 2 pm on the 21st, it is not the Passover moon, but the full moon before the passover moon. Passover does not start for another 29 days. So while I can calculate both events, the actual calculation will depend on different parameters, and as a result will end up pointing to different days or periods of time. Of course there are a number of events on the christian calendar that are directly related to when Easter is set. Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Ascension day, etc.

I’ve also completely glossed over ‘where’ the time has to be compared for determining sunset, and midnight. The Vernal Equinox is at a specific UTC time, but may be posted to a calendar as a local time. For Christian calendars the comparison is likely to be against the local time for Rome which is UTC +1, vs. Jerusalem at UTC +2.

A minor addition is that in addition to the commonly recognized observance of Christmas and new years, there are also orthodox Christian observances which are not the same days as appear on the western calendar because they are based on the Julian calendar observances and not the Gregorian calendar dates.

There are potentially hundreds of additional calendars I could add. For example there are all of holidays recognized in India. I have not added the events in the Islamic calendar, or posted things like various Asian new year and other holidays important to the region. In theory there are over a hundred different country calendars with different holidays being designated. If someone wants to throw together and comment to the page a list of holidays or events that they think should be on a calendar, and would like a calendar created for them, feel free. Eexamples of the calendars that can be created are at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub.pdf and http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub_p.pdf

As I stated in the begining, I may have a few of the items wrong. In any case, enjoy.

Most of my friends are people who have read Robert A. Heinlein at some time in their lives. For many it may be nothing more than Starship Troopers, or Stranger in a Strange Land. For others it may be the juvies, Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, or even Podkaine of Mars. Quite a few will have searched out and read just about everything he has ever written. I’m not quite there, but what I’m short on is generally not in print any more anyway. But that’s not really important at the moment.

Any writer who has been writing a while, at some point comes up with some sort of a timeline for the stories that he’s written. Heinlein was not really different. You will find the timeline in the compendium Expanded Universe if you are interested. One of the things he did in the timeline is described or predicted what the political climate of a few periods of time would be like. In that, we are close to the end of the ‘Crazy Years.’ As many I know would comment, “I hope so!” That’s not really the purpose of the time line though. For that we need to go to ‘Time Enough for Love.”

In TE4L we are introduced to the character Lazarus Long. Lazarus has been around for a while. At the beginning of the book he has decided that he’s been around ‘long enough.’ But that doesn’t sit well with others, so he ends up in a hospital, surviving the situation. One of the discussions that comes up is that the rest of humanity could learn from what Lazarus could tell them from experience. Lazarus scoffs at this, and points out something that as near as I’ve been able to tell is absolutely true. His response was that Humanity as a group does not learn from what anyone says. Humans as individuals in general, do not learn at all. When Humans do learn, it is not through the tales told by someone else, it is through their own experiences. And even that is exceptionally rare. He did agree that having something to try gave you a working starting point where you might have a better chance of learning something, and the end result was the Notebooks of Lazarus Long.

Notebooks of Lazarus Long appears within Time Enough for Love, and if I recall also at least in part in Expanded Universe. However the treasure is to find the stand alone book of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, which ends up in a somewhat odd format. If you can find one intact, they did something a little bit different with this compared to most science fiction. Notebooks is sort of like a book of quotes. Some of these seem self evident, ‘Always store beer in a dark place.’ Others have a humorous bent, “Be wary of strong drink, for it can lead to shooting at tax collectors… …and missing.’ And there are several with specifically romantic intents, ‘Rub her feet.’ and ‘I came, I saw, She conquered! – the original latin seems to have been garbled.’

The one that seems applicable to me tonight however is ‘When the time comes, and it invariably does, a man must be prepared to shoot his own dog. Turning it over to someone else to do does not make it easier or better. It makes it worse.’

At some level the quote can be applied to almost any activity where there is a distasteful element to completing a task, or ensuring the survival of the group. No one wants to shoot their dog. But there are many reasons one may have to. If a dog gets infected with Rabies, it does not matter if that dog was the gentlest of creatures before, it will have to be destroyed. The thing is that Lazarus or Heinlein was not talking about dogs specifically. He was referring to pretty much any pet, animal or otherwise.

People talk about Pet Projects. And some of those end up being things that would be best killed off, by the person who thinks of it as theirs.

In any case, there are problems for many people today with “shout your own dog.’ At the very least if you live in most major cities today, shooting your dog is liable to result in an ‘unlawful discharge of a firearm’ charge being levied against you. In many places it is also difficult or impossible to find a place to bury your dog. In the greater view this is equivalent of rigging things so that you can neither do the job that is your responsibility, nor are you allowed to take care of the mess.

In most places the solution is to take your dog to a veterinarian and based on quality of life observations, the veterinarian may work with you to put your dog to sleep, and then either the ashes from cremation can be returned to you, or they can be cremated in a communal cremation with no ashes returned.

The time came for Mindy to go. There were some signs that she might recover, but I didn’t expect her to fully recover, and what recovery she was making very well could have been a temporary situation. She was also in some pain as she would put no weight on her left rear paw. I did not see any damage to the paw itself, no obvious thorns, or broken toenails or the like, but in combination with her inability to go up stairs on her own, I suspect that there was pain in her hips or elsewhere. Walking was a labor for her, as was getting up. No more the four paws extending as one movement and we’re walking along. First came the struggle to get up on the front paws, almost impossible to accomplish on hard surfaces, then a major struggle to get up on the back legs.

And no, having someone inject a sedative, then a general anesthetic to put your dog to sleep is not better. But at the moment it was the best that I could do for her.

So after approximately 10 years and 3 months, it is just me and Nicholas again. He is old as well. He was 3 when I adopted him in in October of 1998. That means he is 14 now. So he is closing in on the end as well, but for now still has plenty of life left in him.

Nick and I went for a walk today. He was bounding where he could, at the end of his lead. Investigating Goose droppings, and enjoying the attention.

My favorite experience with Mindy was one time when we were visiting my dad. The cat in the house had either been playing with or ignoring a mouse that was annoying to my dad. She may have even brought the mouse in, she had been known to do that in the past. Mindy and I were in the family room, I think I was reading, she was just laying there near me. Suddenly she leapt up and tore into the kitchen. A couple of moments later she walked back into the living room. I had seen the mouse run along the wall into the kitchen, but figured that as quickly as she came back that the mouse had escaped under a cabinet or the stove, and thought nothing more of it for a while. About an hour later my dad walks into the kitchen to discover that there is a dead mouse on the floor. While neither of us attempted to do any sort of an autopsy, there was no obvious damage, such as a broken neck or anything. The cat in the house was totally black, and Mindy as a black lab cross at the time was the same coloration. We figured that the mouse saw Mindy and died from shock at the sudden increase in size of the cat.

So why is this my favorite? Hunting dogs and cats that go after small creatures tend to be fascinated by laser pointers. Nick is no exception, and most people have learned that with their cats and other dogs. Mindy never took the slightest interest in laser pointers. Either she was blind to the light, or more likely she had learned at some point that it was not a good idea to chase after such a spot. But from a good 15 feet away she heard or spotted a mouse, and responded the way we would like all our cats and dogs to respond to a threat to the household.

I’ll leave with that. This story has taken a rather odd route for some readers. I don’t happen to agree with some of Heinlein’s positions. But I will admit that there is value in working through some of the ideas and learning from the experience.

Words 1483 words so far this month 7546

If things go as I expect, this will probably be the last time I blog about Mindy while she is alive. We have an appointment to see the vet tomorrow afternoon, and I’m not really expecting to bring her home, though I would very much like to.

You’ve probably met Mindy if you’ve been reading my blog. There are even pictures of her and Nick around here from this summer.

The last couple of weeks have not shown significant improvement. The last two weeks she has not climbed the stairs to get to our floor and only one or two times has she gone up the entry steps. She strongly favors her left hind leg now, she’s not putting any weight on it for the most part, but when walking will use it. She has collapsed a few times when she stumbles over something, or goes to do a few things she historically has done as part of being her.

We’ve been pretty solidly on canned food for the past week or so. Initially I was mixing canned food with dry, and that was going down, but about one in 5 days she wouldn’t touch it. Then almost every other day. After switching to canned food I’ve left out a dish of dry for each, and Nick has eaten some of that, including I think some that was set out for Mindy.

Mindy has never been a waddler. Even when she was a good 10, 20 or more pounds overweight. But now she is a wobbler. Going down the stairs I try to be there right next to her when she gets to the bottom, because I know she will need a moment to recover from the change in direction, and she will lean against me then. Usually just long enough for me to re-arrange holding the leads so that I can open the door.

I spent some time cuddling with her last night. Feeling ribs is one thing, feeling the cartridge along the edge of the rib cage is a different matter.

There is a possibility that she may be coming home with me tomorrow night. The major problem she is having is that what food she is eating does not seem to be being digested and taken in. She has thrown up a lot of what she has eaten and what she drinks. (No visitors expected for Thanksgiving by the way.) The odd part of this is that the usual reason for a dog throwing up food, especially labs, is an obstruction in the stomach. It is possible that an obstruction can be easily found for her, and removed and she will come home with me, hungry and be on a road to recovery. I’m not laying any money on that possibility however. She’s over 12 years old after all, and I’m pretty sure recovery is not a likely expectation at this point. That said, if I have to carry her up stairs for 2 months to get her to recover her strength to the point where she is able to go up and down on her own, I would.

Mindy has been a significant part of my life for the past 10 years. She has had characteristics odd for a lab. Some of that her history from before me, others may be genetic, but she has always had a good, friendly and playful attitude. That is typical for a lab of course. The only time I’ve ever encountered a lab, or labs that were not friendly folk was when they had gone through significant levels of abuse. And while there are a lot of people who think it’s a state that can’t be recovered from, my own opinion is that a well treated lab will be friendly and loving even if she or he has had problems in the past.

As with all stories, there are both conclusions and pieces that go on. Whether it is tomorrow, next month, or a year or two from now, Mindy will pass away. My life will go on, and for a while I expect that Nicholas will continue to be a part of it for a while, but he is nearing the end also. I make no statement that I will be ‘OK.’ at least not for the immediate future, but I expect to survive. Who knows what the future will bring.

There’s a long standing, and in my opinion in very bad taste, joke about men. The punch line goes “Of course he’s wrong. He’s male.”

What is he wrong about? Really it doesn’t matter.

If it were about any other topic, race, religion, or even politics, a declaration like that would be considered inappropriate. In many cases it would be considered hate speach.

In a few year, or decades, or for the pesimist a few centuries, we may get to the point where an individual who is ignorant of the values and expectations of groups or other even individuals they are dealing with can be sat down with and have the problems with what they have said, or done explained in civil terms.

I do say ‘we may.’ It certainly isn’t today.

No, in today’s world it’s far more entertaining to blow up, attack the person for perceived injustices that they didn’t commit.

I freely admit that there are a large variety of different traits that I find attractive in different women. And some traits that I find attractive in some women I don’t find all that attractive in other women. I would be very surprised if a significant percentage of people reading didn’t think I was talking about physical characteristics. Face, hair, breasts, waist, hips, legs, feet, whatever. I know of people who are fascinated with hands, characteristics of eyes, and so on. That’s fair enough in that a large percentage of men are going to be first interested in another person for their physical characteristics. And there are entirely too many men and boys for whom that is the only thing of interest.

When it comes down to it though, my world is not populated by people who would be considered models. Oh there are a few, but the vast majority of the men and women that I interact with, are not likely to be walking the cat walk any time soon, unless it’s to adjust stage lighting. The fantasy of taking a hot model to bed, or wherever we take each other, is pretty much likely to stay just that. A fantasy.

I was born in the mid 60s, grew up in the 70s and early 80s. My second company commander when I was stationed in Germany in the army was a woman, and I saw entirely too much of how men and women in the company often didn’t give the respect to her that they would have given to the previous company commander, though that changed as their experience with her as a commander grew. She was very good, and one thing she didn’t accept was women in her command trying to use their gender to provide excuses.

As I was growing up, my mother helped to establish a chapter of the League fo Women Voters in Houston county, MN. She marched in support of the equal rights ammendment, and left a job she had been working at for several years because her boss hired a male fresh out of school with no experience in the field at a pay rate higher than she had been earning.

Perhaps the wisest negative view on the Feminist movement that I’ve encountered personally was expressed by a professor I had who’s experince included working for McDonald Douglas on the F-101 fighter as a design engineer. Her opinion was that the thing that the feminist movement got wrong was eliminating the stigma that women were brandes with for being free sexually. It was her opinion that instead of eliminating the stigma, the effort should have been to place an equal stigma upon men who did wrong, either by raping women or abandoning women whom they had been having sexual relations with, either because she became pregnant or because she was suddenly ‘inconvienent’ for some reason.

While I don’t entirely agree with her, I do see her point, and would note that my experience of the direction that the military was moving, regulation wise, appears to be consistent with that view. Also the way that laws and cases related to rape and stalking have gone has begun to reflect the public view that there really is no such thing as ‘asking for it’ when it comes to these actions.

A part of me is somewhat stuck in the 70’s and early 80’s. It is now almost the end of the first decade of the 21st century. I know enough at this point to believe that if effective imortality is only 20 years away as has been predicted by Ray Kurzwell and a few others, that we are very likely to be in significant trouble in the next hundred years. There are entirely too many people who will be alive then, for whom the lessons of the past 2 decades have not been learned.

I don’t know if I will be one of them. A part of me seriously dreads the possibility. I think that has to do with the fact that I’ve lived emotionally alone for the past 20 years, and part of me dreads the possibility of living this way for centuries. That’s not all of the reason by any means, just the easiest to explain.

A different part of me looks at the possibility and wants to be there to see humans as a collection go through the changes, and improvements that are possible. I would like to be a part of that. Though I will admit that I suspect that a lot of what I ‘know’ is likely to be stomped on along the way. (Hope would suggest that the better parts of that are re-learned.)

I as an indivicual can be, and in many cases are, wrong. I make mistakes in how I communicate with people, and at times will offend them. Sometimes it’s intentional, but entirely too often it’s a product of my lack of experience in a situation and being too eager to help. Most of the time if you find something I’ve said to be offensive, and you are not someone I would intentionally joke with that way (usually that’s limited to family) I’ve probably meant something else, and a quick note of ‘I find that statement or joke offensive, did you really mean…’ will be responded to with respect and consideration.

Yes I’m male. I also happen to be White, Anglo-Norse, Protistant (at some level, I grew up in a christian, non-Catholic environment) and have a whole bunch of other bagage, geneticly and environmentally. Perfect I ain’t, but the imperfections are part of Me, not who I grew up around, work out with, where I went to various schools or how they were funded, what color my eyes or hair are. I’m pretty sure that my mistakes are not specifically a reflection on my gender either. They all have input into what my makeup is, and undoubtedly have something to do with my past and future, and how my mind works. But singeling out my gender is about as silly as suggesting that ‘women are bad drivers’ or similarly inane platitudes.

We all have to make judgements on how we are going to interact with the people around us. It is a defense mechanism which protects us from cheap con-artists and the like. It’s based on our interactions with others over time. Likewise our expectations are set based on how we understand others have been affected by various people. As a result, initial expectations end up being set. Some people choose to live within those initial expectations. They measure the responses and the interactions they have with others agains those expectations but do not change their expectations as a result. That is what prejudice really is. Appropriate interaction treats each person as their own person. Their actions are their own. There may be cultural and religious or other influences on thos actions, but with the exception of a very few limited situations, you are unlikely to know what those influences are going to be ahead of time.

So yes I am guilty of being male. That doesn’t mean that I get to carry all your bagage about men on my back. I have enough damn bagage of my own that I am fighting with.

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.