Saturday morning

The S.O. has been in Texas for a few days -- he's dogsitting while the Younger Daughter is getting paid to play with fire at LBJ National Grasslands (which is, I think, somewhere northwest of Dallas) -- so I've been having trouble sleeping. His snoring usually does a nice job of blocking out outside noise, so when he's gone, I seem to hear every car door slamming in the parking lot. Right about the time I adjust, of course, he'll be back, and then it'll be the snoring that keeps me awake. 

As usual, I'm listening to C-SPAN. They're talking about potential Supreme Court nominees as well as looking back at Justice Stevens, both as a person and as a jurist. Interestingly enough, most of the names being bandied about as front-running candidates are women:  Elaine Kagan, Jennifer Granholm, Diane Wood. Given that there are two women on the court now, I'm not sure President Obama will lean towards nominating another.  But who knows? 

Surprisingly enough, maybe because a discussion of jurisprudence and potential justices is a fairly esoteric subject, the tinfoil hats and the haters are fairly thin on the ground this morning. One woman called to complain about C-SPAN's liberal bias and the numbers of fake Republicans they allow on the air -- apparently anyone who calls in on the Republican line but fails to regurgitate the talking points provided by Beck et al isn't an actual Republican, especially when that person says something sane -- but that's about it so far. Maybe things will get loonier when the topic changes later in the morning.

I haven't actually been paying much attention to politics lately. I did notice Bart Stupak (D-Michigan) announced he's not running again, which kind of depressed me. I used to live in his district; he was a decent Congressman on most issues. I totally disagreed with his stance on abortion, but I respected his consistency. The teabaggers are taking credit for his retirement, but the S.O. thinks he'd been planning it for awhile and that's why he was so willing to piss so many people off during the healthcare reform battles. He might be right. I think Stupak lost a lot of his passion for politics when his son died almost ten years ago, but was unwilling to step down as long as there was a Republican in the White House. But other than that, though, I've been more focused on my personal life and work than I have on national issues.

Because the S.O. is in Texas, I'm back to riding the bus to work. I've thought about being ambitious enough to walk (it is only a mile), but for now am busing it in the morning, and walking in the afternoon. Taking the bus provided yet another experience to remind me I'm now Older Than Dirt. When the bus got to my stop, the driver had the bus kneel so it would be a shorter step down! ZOMG. Being called ma'am by strangers and Miss Nancy by younger Southern co-workers was bad enough. . . but now a kneeling bus. Makes a person feel like it's time to start shroud shopping. Or maybe start walking both ways to avoid that sort of humiliation. I'll just try to remember that to anyone under the age of 30, everyone over the age of 30 might as well have one foot in the grave.

Life at Large Nameless Agency is rolling along in typical bureaucratic fashion. We acquired a new Director back in June 2009, and one of his first moves was to initiate a "reorganization" intended, we all assume, to remove the cooties left by his predecessor (a Bush appointee). At the time, the man said he intended to get it all done within 90 days. Ha. There has been a fair amount of shuffling, particularly in the upper management levels, but from the perspective of us peons, it's now been almost a year and nothing's changed. The work is the same, the people we report directly to are the same, . . . the only visible sign of anything different is the nested set of abbreviations that follow my name in emails changed. It used to show up as My Name(LNA/Center Abbreviation/Division Abbreviation/Branch Abbreviation) and now it's just MyName(LNA/Mystery Abbreviation/ Branch Abbreviation). No one's really sure what the Mystery Abbreviation stands for -- oh, we know what it spells out, we're just not sure what it does, will it actually be around very long, or is it just a space holder. 

I don't actually care much -- I've got less than a month to go before the countdown to eligibility for retirement turns into negative numbers and I slide fulltime into that lovely "I don't give a rat's patoot because I can walk anytime" territory -- but some of my colleagues waste a lot of time agonizing about it. I don't know why. The little box we're in on the org chart may change names, but our jobs won't. There are no reductions in force planned, and we're full-time federal employees in a humongous bureaucracy. Unless a FTE gets caught dancing naked while stoned on a desk in a public area, it's damn hard to get rid of us. And, even if you do get caught dancing drunk and naked, odds are you're more likely to be referred to counseling than to be escorted out the door. If an FTE is sufficiently incompetent (and I've seen a few people who have been, and were eventually terminated), it is possible to fire somebody, but there's enough paperwork involved that the usual solution is to just shuffle people into closets where they can't do much damage.  

I am still hoping that I can work out a telework arrangement that would allow me to leave Atlanta while continuing to collect fulltime wages because I've grown rather fond of my salary (especially compared to what the pension will be), but the waters in my branch have been poisoned by a couple people who abused the privilege. It figures. They managed to finagle telework arrangements and since then have been failing to produce quality work in a timely fashion and are causing various headaches for the branch chief.  It has, of course, made the chief extremely reluctant to approve any new arrangements, especially a telework arrangment that would mean the only contacts with me would be via telephone or internet.  I'm hoping it's an easier sell once I'm actually past the magic date where I can walk if I'm not happy.  I'm not the best copy editor at the journal, but I'm also far from the worst -- and, more important, I always meet deadlines, which can't be said for all my colleagues.  Besides, if and when the dust ever settles from the reorganization, it's quite possible the person who gets to make the decision won't be my current chief, but a new one with a different perspective. I can hope.

The remodeling project here in the townhouses is moving fast.  When I chatted with the contractor yesterday, he said they'd framed the floors for a couple units already, but the exteriors are looking the same as always.  Given that the bottom of the picture windows above the patio doors is well below the level of the second floor floor (almost a full foot), that strikes me as odd.  It also strikes me as odd that the management would not take the time to change out those windows that date from the 1960s and thus have all the energy efficiency of a sheet of typing paper. On the other hand, depending on how they're planning the work, it could be a lot easier to change the fenestration once there's a floor on the interior instead of having to rely on scaffolding both inside and out to deal with the window opening. We shall see. . .  The more important fact is that they're moving along fast enough that it's possible we'll be out of this townhouse and into the one next door before the end of May. The S.O. is already predicting that I'll walk into walls a lot because that unit is a mirror image of this one.  He's apparently looking forward to some good laughs as I walk into the coat closet instead of the kitchen and then bitch about not being able to find the refrigerator.   

Mining

SueJ has the lyrics to this up over at Nailing Jello to the Wall, and that reminded me I'd seen this video someplace recently (and I am, of course, totally blanking on where).

One of the things that's been lost in teaching history in the US is just how incredibly violent American labor history is.  Everything we enjoy today -- e.g., the idea of an 8 hour day, 5 day work week -- was bought with blood.  If it had been left up to the employers, we'd all still be putting in 14 hour days and working for starvation wages.

The remodel next door

A few months ago the apartment manager told the S.O. they were planning to rehab these townhouses (to the left of the pool), which are one-bedroom lofts, into either 2 bedrooms or 1 bedroom with a den, in hopes of attracting more tenants.  I think our one-bedroom loft-style apartment is fine (despite the occasional day when I'd kind of like to be able to lock the cat out of the bedroom)(hard to do when two of the walls are more like railings), but apparently I'm an exception.  Most prospective renters apparently aren't that thrilled with the current floorplan.

Given the snail's pace taken in rehabbing the building that burnt almost 2 years ago (they're still not done to the point of actually renting out any units in it), I did not expect to see any construction activity until sometime in Obama's second term.  I was wrong.

I got home from work today and discovered two roll-off dumpsters in the parking lot, the doors to all the vacant units open, and several radios blasting out norteño tunes.  The demo has begun. 

The S.O. was wrong, too.  He's been totally convinced there wasn't a scrap of insulation in the walls in these buildings.  Now that the drywall is gone, insulation is visible on both the exterior walls and the party wall between the townhouses. 

I  hate to see them destroy the historic integrity of the buildings -- they're circa 1968 -- by changing the fenestration on the side facing the pool when they put in a different second floor window, but it's hard enough to find decent tenants for an older garden apartments complex with minimal amenities (no weight room, no wifi, no covered parking, just the outdoor pool that's usable for maybe 4 months of the year) that I can understand why they're doing it.

Plus, if we stay here long enough (and I have no plans to move any place else as long as we have to be in Atlanta), I will eventually get to enjoy a space that can be a cat-free zone.  We've been told that once the unit next door is done, we can move into it without experiencing any increase in rent.  If we do, that will be one of the easier moves we've made.

The garden is in

All that pollen floating around put me in the mood to go out and plow the back 40.  Quick trip to Lowe's, and the garden is in:

This year I decided to kill a new (to me) variety of tomato, Black Prince, a Russian heirloom variety.

I am moderately curious as to how there could be Russian heirloom tomatoes when tomatoes originated in the New World, not Europe, but not curious to the point of actually researching it.

And, yep, the dust on the plant stand is pine pollen.

Time to get out the shovels

I do believe Atlanta is the first place I've lived where clouds of pollen were so thick in the air that they could be mistaken for smoke. I looked out the window this morning and my first thought was something was burning -- and then I realized what I was seeing was yellow and coming from the pine trees.  My once-white car is now chartreuse.  They're doing pollen counts on the local news again, although I'm not sure why they bother.  When the stuff is forming drifts on the sidewalks, you don't need a weatherman to tell you the count is high.

And we wonder why the Taliban is making a comeback

The New York Times has a report up guaranteed to make it clear why the Taliban is being welcomed back by the Afghan people.  It starts with a flinch-inducing headline -- U.S. Admits Role in Killing Women in Afghanistan -- and goes downhill from there:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

 -- snip --

 NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians -- a district prosecutor and a local police chief -- during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.

Three women also died that night at the same home:  One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death -- or had died by some other means -- hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.

 -- snip --

 And in what could be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also "dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath" and then "washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened."

The article concludes with an interesting contradiction:  first NATO investigators say that they, too, found signs of tampering with evidence at the home, such as bullets dug out of walls, walls being washed, etc., and then they conclude by rejecting "allegations that the killings were covered up." 

The house was apparently full of people because the families had been celebrating the birth of a grandson to the owner of the house.

The article also notes that botched raids by Special Ops forces have been causing numerous headaches for NATO.  So what makes those guys so Special and why are they still allowed to go roaming around at night with guns?  How many times do they have to fuck up before someone figures out the appropriate barracks for most of them is in Leavenworth, Kansas?

Lewis and Clark National Historical Park

Lewis and Clark National Historical Park is one of those interesting partnership parks that have evolved in recent decades.  It has a core resource -- Fort Clatsop -- directly owned and managed by the National Park Service, and a number of partner sites in the area around the mouth of the Columbia River that are in some way associated with the Lewis and Clark expedition, like Cape Disappointment State Park in Washington.  The wayside above, for example, is in Astoria, near the Astoria column. 

The views from that location are, to say the least, good. 

There are also a fair number of NPS-designed waysides along the waterfront in Astoria, each one providing some insight into local history, the natural environment, and Lewis and Clark.  On the Washington side of the river, Lewis and Clark turn up at sites all the way up to Long Beach. 

William Clark apparently caught a sturgeon there, as well as observing a flounder for the first time. 

Cape Disappointment State Park also features prominently in the Lewis and Clark story.  The expedition apparently spent some time in the Cape Disappointment area debating whether they should remain on that side of the river for the winter, or move to the south bank. 

Cape Disappointment State Park covers about 5,000 acres, includes 2 lighthouses (Cape Disappointment and North Head), and has the usual hiking trails and campgrounds in addition to the late 19th century military fortifications and a really nice visitor center. Fort Canby was built to protect the mouth of the Columbia River, as was Fort Stevens on the Oregon side.  From whom, I'm not sure, but apparently someone felt vulnerable.

The original plan for the fort was to place the guns right next to the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse, right about where that Jeep is sitting in the photo.  The visitor center had a nifty circa 1895 photo showing the mortars in place, cannonballs stacked neatly next to them, as well as a number of no-longer extant ancillary buildings for the lighthouse (a keepers' quarters to the right of that modern sidewalk, for example).  Then they test-fired the largest gun -- and multiple windows shattered.  So they moved everything, and built Fort Canby.  The lighthouse had a first-order Fresnel lens that's now on display in this building:

This is what Fort Canby looks like now as seen from the lighthouse -- it's the visitor center at the park.

That wide concrete path leading up to the Cape Disappointment lighthouse is rather deceptive, too.  It's the Coast Guard access road -- there is a Coast Guard station located on Cape Disappointment; it abuts the state park.  This is the signage in the parking lot for the park, and when they said muddy trail, they weren't kidding.  The first 3/4s of the trail was slick, mucky, and occcasionally treacherous, especially when it was raining.  Then you come around a bend, and see that concrete leading to a gate in the chain link fence for the Coast Guard station.  And it's not really a path; it's a road -- we met a full-size government pickup truck coming down it while we were walking up. After slipping on mud for almost half a mile, it felt weird to do the last couple hundred feet on smooth concrete. 

The other lighthouse in the park is North Head; it was built because ships approaching from north were unable to see the Cape Disappointment light until they were a lot closer than they wanted to be to the treacherous shoals around the mouth of the river.

As for the site most closely associated with Lewis and Clark, Fort Clatsop, it was about what one would expect. Everyone knows the fort is a reproduction, and a pretty new one at that.  The "original" Fort Clatsop visitors saw at this site was a reconstruction from the mid-1950s.  It burned down right about the time everyone was gearing up for the big Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration a few years ago.  NPS managed to get a reproduction reproduction up in record time, and it looks great.  The nice thing about it being so new is it does a great job of conveying the feeling that the actual Fort Clatsop would have had back in 1804:  raw timbers, nothing weathered, no brush growing up around the fort.  One thing that strikes me when I look at photos taken of the original reproduction fort was the way bushes (ornamental shrubs?) were allowed to grow right up against the structure, which was bizarre.  Historical accuracy would demand cleared land for quite a distance around it simply because it would have all been as raw as any other piece of new construction.

Gotta love those wooden chimneys.  They were plastered on the inside with mud and designed to be pulled down fast if they caught fire (they were pretty common in pioneer construction), but nonetheless the mind boggles.

Fort Clatsop itself is quite nice for a small park.  It has a few trails for ambling along, including board walks through the boggy spots along the river, picnic areas, and a decent visitor center.

The visitor center has a film that tells the Lewis and Clark story from the perspective of the Native Americans who were stuck with the explorers as not especially welcome neighbors for the winter. 

There were several other state parks in the area that are partners with NPS in Lewis and Clark National Historical Park that we simply did not have time to see.  Maybe next time.

Adventures in bureaucracy

A fellow employee here at LNA could use some editorial help. (Sorry about the blurriness, but one tends to shoot fast when using a camera in the ladies' room.)