I gave up on playing nice a long time ago

Got treated to a rather sexist and cliched speech yesterday in which I was told it's a lot easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar.

No, actually it's easier to catch flies with chunks of dead meat, but who cares? We folk who present as female, we women, have been getting told to play nice forever. And you know what playing nice usually gets you? A label on your forehead that screams DOOR MAT and your questions or problems ignored.

Actually, I shouldn't suggest the being ignored is tied solely to gender. It happens to dudes, too. We had problems with our internet service provider (ISP) for months. The S.O. called the company multiple times, left numerous messages, and never got any call backs or an on-site visit. So then I made an in-person visit to the ISP's office. What do you know? Apparently it takes a blue hair getting truly bitchy to get people to pay attention. After a couple months of "someone will call you back" and not ever getting a call back, we suddenly had multiple trucks parked in the yard as the internet specialist and phone company linemen tried to figure out just what was causing the poor connections.

They never did figure it out except to conclude the line is obsolete, but at least they came up and tried. Would they have ever done that if we'd stuck to the polite phone calls? Somehow I doubt it.

I did kind of a verbal NDA at yesterday's tribal council meeting so it wouldn't be ethical to go into any specific details other than to say a major issue appears to be on its way to a solution. I will, however, say that if one more person locally tells me that a person I characterized as an asshat (and, yes, I know, it's not particularly dignified for an old lady to use the same descriptors as a character on "South Park") is actually a really, really nice guy I'm going to turn hyperbolic and remind them that's what Ann Rule once said about Ted Bundy. Or, for that matter, to use a local example, what the people who attended church in South Range said about David Goodreau before they found out he'd murdered two women and was caught while targeting a third victim. None of us has any way of knowing if the people we know behave the same way when you're not around that they do when you're right in front of them. They may not all be serial killers, but they can sure as heck be asshats occasionally.

Defining nice

In the recent kerfuffle over the creation of Mount FOAD at the end of the county road, what I kept hearing from various people were variations on the "But he's such a nice guy!" You know, "But he'd never do that! I know the guy. He's a nice person." "He plays the organ at church." "He has a lovely family." I had an older guy tell me yesterday that he'd known the dude his whole life and "He's a nice kid." No one wanted to believe that the guy they knew personally could be a total jerk when he was operating a snowplow.

Without wading too far into the weeds, "But he's such a nice guy!" is the classic line that gets trotted out almost every time something happens that doesn't match up with how people close to the person in question see that person. Best sellers have been written about that disconnect.

The self people present depends a great deal on where they are and who they're interacting with. The guy who plays the organ every Sunday in church can be one person when he's socializing with other members of the congregation and completely different in a setting with people he does not know and sees no reason to be "nice" to. The fact one of your acquaintances is nice to you personally does not  mean he is equally nice to everyone he meets or has to deal with.

We all do it. When I'm volunteering at the museum I'm a whole lot friendlier when it's not noon yet and I'm actively hoping for visitors. Step into the museum right around the time we close, though, it's a crap shoot. I might not care that I'd just taken down the Open flag, but if it's been a tiring afternoon I could just as easily turn really cold in telling people we're closed for the day. One set of visitors, the ones I manage to put on the happy face for, are going to describe me as nice; the ones I turn away because it's 10 minutes after we've officially closed will probably have a different impression.

I've never been real keen on describing anyone as "nice" to begin with. What exactly does it mean? He's never kicked any puppies in your presence? He's willing to be a church usher? He's a Scout leader? Doesn't hold wild parties? Visits his elderly mother on a regular basis? Polite when spoken to? What "nice" usually turns out to mean is "he's nice to me." Could be an embezzler, a pervert, a drunk, whatever, but as long as he's nice when you're around, he's a nice guy.

Prepping for Tribal Council

This Thursday I'm going to the County Road Commission meeting. I've been busy printing maps and photos to be sure I have them when I need them. If I wait, I might forget.

I had originally intended to just be there to request they put the long-deferred maintenance on our road on to their project list for this coming summer, but things changed a bit when we got hit with a blizzard exactly one week ago. That's when the asshat who operates the snowplow for our road decided to prove he's not just incompetent, he's a prick.

The dude has been remarkably annoying all winter. The first couple times it snowed he didn't bother plowing to the end of our road; he turned around by the neighbor's driveway. Okay, I thought, like just about every other person in Baraga County he's not familiar with our road and he thinks that's where it ends. I called the County Road Commission office; that didn't help -- next time it snowed, once again he did not plow to the end.

So I went in to the office, laid it on thick with the office administrator about the road not ending where the operator apparently thought it ended, and she said she'd talk with the foreman or the engineer. They'd make sure the operator got the message. At the time, I also told her (as we've been telling people for years) that because the road hasn't been properly maintained, it's real easy to not realize it is indeed county road. It doesn't get graded in the summer, the right of way hasn't been brushed in so long there are trees growing in it that are practically saw timber size. You know, you shouldn't look at a tree that's growing on what is technically the shoulder of a road and start wondering just how many board feet a person could get out of it. About once every other year or so, usually after I've called to complain that we're going to have to buy an Amphicar to get through the giant puddle that never goes away, they'll do a load or two of gravel.

The puddle never goes away because there's a spring about 50 feet up the road and no ditch on that side so there's water running or seeping from late March into November. Permanent puddle.

Anyway, as the result of two things, one being the close to complete lack of maintenance and the rather odd fact the neighbor's driveway looks like real road (and not the goat trail of my childhood), it can be difficult to comprehend that the road swings to the left to go around the hill and not to the right. The latter is the result of the road commission buying fill dirt from my uncle in the 1980's. Back when I was a little barracuda and we lived on what had been my grandfather's farm, the driveway was indeed a goat trail. Rocky, rutted, and generally better suited for horses than for cars. There was a rock outcropping that meant people had to be careful driving in or out or risk losing a muffler.

My old man got disgusted enough with the condition of the driveway that he spent real money on a contractor who used dynamite and a bulldozer to make it less of a hazard. Then when the county bought the fill dirt, they built the driveway up more so it could handle heavy truck traffic. That was around 30 years ago, but they did such a good job that it still looks like a road, unlike the actual road that terminates at our property line. People get lost all the time trying to find our place because the road doesn't look like a road. Every new UPS or FedEx driver wants to deliver to the neighbor instead of us because they don't believe there's a road here, and even people who live up here have trouble finding it.

The silver lining, of course, is that it's probably been 30 years since we had Jehovah's Witness knock on the front door.

In any case, after the phone call, a visit to the office, and more phone calls the dude did start plowing all the way to the end of the road. Sort of. It is a short section, probably less than the length of a football field, but it's barely one lane wide, has a nasty sharp curve, and there is no turn around where it ends. There used to be one, the county put it in, but they then forgot about it, did not maintain it, and the swamp reclaimed it. The operator realized that no matter which way he came in, front end first or by reversing, there was going to be backing up involved. It then became clear to me that the poor sap had minimal experience in driving a dump truck in reverse, at least not when it required more than just backing in a straight line or doing a nice neat T-turn. His tracks had enough wandering in them that you'd have thought he'd never had to back a truck up before. The S.O. did a fair amount of muttering about people who can't use mirrors to reverse. (The S.O. did over-the-road for awhile and has alley docked semis in New Orleans. He doesn't have much respect for truck drivers who don't know how to use their mirrors.)

 Maybe it was because of the backing problem, but whether or not our little short section got plowed continued to be more a matter of random chance than anything else. Time after time I'd drive out pushing snow with the bumper of my Focus, get to the end of the neighbor's driveway, and discover that once again that's where the plow turned around. More phone calls to the Road Commission, a slight improvement for a week or two, and then back to the same shit performance. The truly weird part was if it hasn't snowed much at all, he'd plow. If we got ten inches? Nope. That's when I'd have to make another phone call.

The last time I got annoyed on my way to town, which was a little over a week ago, I decided, okay, time for another in person visit. This was just a couple days before the blizzard. I stopped at the Road Commission office, talked with the secretary/office administrator/whatever she is and asked when the Road Commission met next. I wasn't actually planning to bitch about the specific driver; I just wanted to ask them to do some basic maintenance on our little short piece of road, maybe get it up to where it would at least meet the DNR standards for an ATV trail. My reasoning was (and still is) if that short section of road actually looked like county road and the first curve was more clearly defined, two things might happen. One is that the guys out operating the equipment would know for sure what was road and what was not. The other is that by widening the final 300 feet a bit, it would be easier for the snow plow operator to do his job in the winter.

Then the blizzard hit. Of course, on Sunday morning we didn't know yet it was going to an actual true blizzard. The weather forecast was for a lot of snow and horrible driving conditions, but the snowfall totals in the forecasts are notoriously inaccurate. Fairly early in the morning the S.O. was on the phone with a friend who also lives at the end of a dead end road. During the course of their conversation the friend tells him, "yes, the plows are out. The snowplow just turned around in my yard a little while ago." Okay, the plows are out. So the S.O. decides to work on clearing our driveway even though it's still snowing. His reasoning is that if a lot is going to fall, get rid of what's fallen so far so it will be easier to get rid of the rest later. He gets out to the end of our driveway -- absolutely no sign of the snowplow. Once again the asshat had seen fit to plow all the way into someone else's front yard but could not be bothered to plow actual county road.

I'd had it. Final straw. We'd been putting up with crap service all winter. I vented on Facebook in a local sales and discussion group. Got a lot of shit comments from people who seemed to think I was expecting the guy to do more than his actual job, but that's par for the course with Facebook. It brings out the idiot in people.

Monday morning the sky is clear blue, not a cloud in sight, and the wind is gone. It's a lovely winter day. I call the county to suggest to them they might want to send the front end loader up to open our little bit of road -- that curve makes it tricky, and if there'd be a lot of drifting the regular plow, either truck or grader, might get stuck. After lunch the S.O. fires up the snowthrower and heads out to clear the driveway. He comes back from his first pass absolutely furious. He's so pissed I'm worried he's going to have what used to be referred to as an apoplectic fit. Why is he furious? See photo below.

Asshat snowplow driver had made one pass, came straight in pushing snow ahead of him, and then backed out, leaving a humongous pile sitting at the end of the county road. And, because he truly is an ass who never did figure out just where the county road ends and our driveway begins, he left the whole mess several feet over on the county's side of the line.

This is when, as the saying does, the fecal matter began to hit the air distribution system. The shit flinging wasn't in full force until after I called the Road Commission office to ask when they were going to be back to finish clearing the road. That's when the secretary (or whatever she is) said, in essence, "Oh, he's done up there. He said he went in with the grader and he's done." Lots of questions from me along the lines of "It's going to take a loader to move that pile! What are we supposed to do?" with the secretary responding with the polite version of "Fuck off and die. Not the county's problem." Some polite blithering about how he couldn't do any better because he had the grader.

Okay. First a long email to the county engineer, who from what I could gather later was pretty much unaware there was an ongoing issue (I should have contacted him months ago but made the rather foolish mistake of assuming the secretary was passing on my messages. So much for that fantasy.) The email to the engineer had two attachments: a formal letter of complaint about the snowplow operator (and, yes, I'm doing hard copies, too, one through the postal service and one being hand carried in this Thursday) and a copy of the photo of Mount FOAD. That was followed by another vent on the local sales and discussion group, which once again elicited the usual flurry of totally shit comments from idiots -- I loved the people who advised us to get some snow removal equipment (note photo above where our cleared driveway ends a few feet before Mount FOAD) or told us "You shouldn't have moved here if you didn't want to deal with snow." It's a little late for that advice considering the S.O. was born in a house that used to stand close to where the Woman Cave is now. This farm has been in his family for over 100 years.

However, mixed in with those comments was one from a woman who said "My husband is the snowplow operator in Herman. He would never have done that!" News flash, lady. Your husband is a dick. One does wonder just what the dude got to hear once he got home and his wife asked him if he'd really deliberately blocked access to the county road for two senior citizens. If the dude disliked us before for sure we're on his shit list now. C'est la vie.

Communicating with the engineer got results. The grader was back Tuesday morning. The road was cleared. He did it the same way it could easily have been done on Monday, through coming straight in and back blading Mount FOAD out of the road. One of the reasons both the S.O. and I were so pissed about that mountain is that we both knew perfectly well it was a "fuck you" from the operator because we'd complained about him in the past. The secretary may be technologically illiterate enough to believe that the front plow on a grader is fixed in place so back blading wouldn't be an option. The photo at the top is pretty compelling evidence that's not true.

Would the road have gotten cleared if I hadn't complained so vigorously? Probably not. The one pass in and an immediate out sends a pretty clear message that he had done all he planned to do, especially when he did it before noon. He made the rather stupid assumption that we'd get out the shovels and take care of his mess ourselves. He was wrong, and he royally pissed us off. He was supposed to be opening roads. Instead, he chose to block us, something that no other equipment operator has ever done in the S.O.'s lifetime. The one thing we could always count on was that if we could our car to the road, the road would be open.

Because Facebook does this odd thing where you get notified if a friend is tagged in other posts, quite a few people who do not live in Baraga County now know for sure that a lot of the stereotypes about rural areas are true. A couple told me they kind of got sucked into reading the whole comment thread, especially after the S.O. jumped into it. Like me, they thought it was pretty funny we were being advised to go back to where we came from. Ignorance is apparently bliss for way too many people. What's the equivalent of "Paddle faster. I hear banjos" when the snow is four feet deep? The woods up here really are full of dumb fucks.

One of those non-local friends, a fellow "Survivor" fan, has teased me about the Road Commission meeting and wants to know if I can do a live feed from "Tribal Council." Tempting though it is, I think I'll pass.

What's with the shroud?

Is it just me or is this not one of the odder decorating choices a person could make? This graphic shows up in IKEA ads on a regular basis. Maybe my mind moves in odd ways, but why would anyone want to hang the Shroud of Turin on their bedroom wall?

Okay, so it's not actually a shroud. Shrouds are more like those oversize fleeces with a hood that resemble the weird hybrid that would result if a blanket mated with a bathrobe, but this thing comes close. The hanging the garment, whatever it might be, so it looks like it's been crucified does not help. It's weird, just flat out weird.

Those Swedes are definitely strange people. I guess there are good reasons for Finns to make fun of them.

Why did we become so boring?

L'Anse High School graduation announcement

I've been puttering away at home scanning and inventorying archival material from the museum because it's too cold to work in the building when the furnace is dead. It must be an effect of aging because I'm noticing the cold more this winter than I did back in 2012-2013 when there was also no gas heat in the building. Back then I managed fine with just an electric space heater in the office.

Closed

Open. There's multiple pages including a class roll under that top sheet. 

In any case, I've been hauling stacks of material home, working through it, and then hauling it back. I'm slowly figuring out what all was in a 40-quart Sterlite bin that ostensibly was packed with miscellaneous school-related ephemera.

Naturally, like everything else I've gotten into in the past six years, ostensible and reality are not synonymous. It is mostly school stuff -- graduation announcements, programs from school plays and concerts, school newspapers -- although there is some odd stuff mixed in, like a yearbook from a local church and a set of aviation navigation tools (e.g., a specialized protractor).

What 1932 looks like when open. And, yes, I cringed when I saw that year written on the front in ink. Made absolutely no sense when the year is clearly shown in that triangle at the top. 

There's also the usual issue of confusing labels, like a gallon ziplock bag labeled "L'Anse" when it's actually full of things from Baraga High School, and vice versa.

Some of the material is interesting, some pretty dull, and the process overall is fairly tedious. It's the type of task I'd hate if it was paid job but when I'm doing it as a volunteer with no set schedule, no deadlines, and the ability to get up and walk away any time it starts to feel too boring, I can't complain. At least my home office is warm.

Another one with multiple pages, hence the leather lace binding. 

One thing does have me wondering, though. When did we as a society decide to become so damn boring? From the earliest graduation announcements I've found up until the late 1930's, there's a lot of variety. The announcements are different shapes, different colors. Some are elaborate with multiple folds, some are simple but not bland. Why did we go from using announcements like the ones shown above to every one being happy with something as bland and lifeless as the example below?

Jostens has been around since 1897 as a supplier of school memorabilia -- rings, pins, announcements, yearbook printing. Their logo is embossed on the back of some the announcements I've been scanning. Did they make the decision to turn boring, or was it a case of their more creative competitors going out of business so they felt free to slack off on design work? It's a mystery.

(Actually, I can see it as being a logical business decision. The niftier announcements with multiple pages and lacing to hold them together were definitely more labor intensive, and even a simple one sheet like the 1922 announcement with its two folds involves a special shape for the paper. The boring ones use a standard size paper so can be run off quickly and are easily machine folded. Still, the older announcements were definitely a lot more interesting than the ones graduating seniors send out these days.)

Happy birthday, Val

Time marches on.

Having visions of Fimbulvetr

Looking out the window this morning all I can think is "Christ on crutch, is it ever going to stop snowing?" I'm feeling like we're trapped in a fantasy/horror story I once read about a person who ends mentally stuck inside a snow globe forever. In terms of total inches, it's not actually that bad yet -- our record snow total is about 430 inches for one winter and we're only up to around 150 -- but it has gotten to the point where it's causing problems for us. The S.O. is running out space to shove it out of the way with the plow truck. The driveway is getting narrower and narrower -- I want to order something online but can't because I know perfectly well that at the moment if the UPS truck came in here he wouldn't be able to turn around to get out again. The snowbanks are creeping too far in, and the turnaround has definitely shrunk.

We should order another cord of firewood, but it's the same deal. If the guy we bought the last cord from came in now with his dump trailer, he'd have a horrible time trying to get turned around to get out again. Backing out from our place is not an option when it would require reversing for about 800 feet and negotiating a couple of curves. Not dramatic curves, granted, but still not fun to do when the snowbanks are closing in and if you're off by just a couple inches you're going to get stuck. (We're not going to freeze if we don't have wood delivered. We do have a propane furnace as a back-up, but don't like using it.)

The thing that kind of worries me is this is only the middle of February. What's going to happen in March? March is when we get the spring storms where snowfall gets measured in feet, not inches, and the stuff that falls tend to be slush instead of fluff. Maybe I should be stocking the freezer and prepping for us being basically snowed in for awhile. I know that between the use of the plow truck, an ATV with a plow on it, a snow thrower, and the Yooper scooper we will always be able to get our driveway open eventually, but we could end up with multiple days where it's not possible to get into town. 

I am really missing the county road commission this winter. They stopped doing private driveways a few years ago, but this is the first winter where not having that grader come in occasionally is actually an issue.

Photo is of the S.O. plowing a couple weeks ago. We've gotten a lot more snow since then.

I don't worry, I know

I don't worry about invisible formatting. I know it's happening. All it takes is looking at what's happening in HTML as a final step in editing and seeing a gazillion formatting commands that are going to do strange things as soon as I hit "publish." 

How to ensure your political party dies

I did not watch the State of the Union address. It doesn't matter who the President happens to be, I never watch that speech because it's just pure political theater. It has, however, been interesting watching and listening to the after-the-fact responses.

Older Republican men seem to be especially flummoxed by the Democratic women. The amount of ignorance, sexism, and just plain out-of-touch-with-the-real-world bloviating has been a tad unreal. One dude was blathering on about, more or less, "what was with all that white? They looked like the KKK." Holy shit. The stupid, it burns*. Apparently that dude did not bother to listen to any of the women when in the days leading up to the State of the Union they explained  they were going to wear white to honor the history of the suffragettes who pushed for voting rights. No mystery, just a clear cut homage to the women in the past who made it possible for women to be in Congress and the Senate now.

Other male pundits and political establishment men didn't go quite that far into the depths of displaying their ignorance, but there has been an astounding amount of condescension and mockery. Lots and lots of thinly disguised "Oh, how cute. Look at the little girls playing at government." The news media is starting to call the middle-aged white dudes out on their cluelessness and rudeness, but the guys still don't get that they're digging their own political grave. A former Republican Congressman kept referring to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as a "barista," for example, and a reporter  chastised him for not treating Ocasio-Cortez with the respect any elected representative deserves. The Republican's response? He changed the subject. That type of clueless, belittling behavior emphasizes to anyone watching just how misogynistic the current Republican party is. And the more they do it, the more they sneer at women and belittle people like Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and Ilhan Omar, the easier it becomes for activist groups like Emily's List to recruit more women to run for office.

One reason the Republicans did poorly at the polls in November 2018 is they're managing more and more to be see as the party of out-of-touch, stupid old white men. They used to be able to count on one group of women -- college educated whites -- but even they're jumping ship. If the GOP can't attract minorities of any color, and they're losing women, what's left? Sooner or later the supply of not-very-smart white guys is going to run out. Every so often someone in the GOP will point this out, but apparently the old dudes in office now figure it's not their problem: they're already guaranteed a pension and a cushy lobbying job if they're voted out, so why worry if the party as a whole goes the way of the Whigs?

*The dumbest remark at all may have come from Don jr who criticized Ocasio-Cortez for not wearing a flag lapel pin when, with the exception of the President, no one in the Trump family bothered to wear one either, including Don jr.