b.rox

Dear Persephone,

It’s finally happened. Your imagination has caught fire, and I’ve been drawn into your fantasy world on several occasions.

Granted, you’ve had an active imagination for a while. I still remember the first time you took a block and said it was a train.

But now you’ve taken it to the next level. It started a couple weeks ago. You wanted to get up on our bed, to play a game your mother taught you, of pretending the bed is a boat and the floor is water. I hoisted you up, and I asked if there were alligators in the water.

From that point on, your thoughts guided us. You found a baby alligator who became your friend. Soon you found two, one green, the other pink. You took the alligators with us and they kept us company for most of the rest of the day, and the mama and dada alligators were often lurking in the distance, but we held them at bay.

Years from now you might think I’m mocking you, so perhaps I should make clear that this was for me a joyous experience. I felt incredibly privileged to be caught up in your imaginings. And at the same time I felt a little sad, as I was reminded for some reason of our mortality, and mine especially, and the time we will have here together seemed suddenly far too short to me.

I really need to get on top of this stuff before the list gets any longer. We’ve been living in our new house for almost three-quarters of a year now, and so far we’ve done very little. Of course that was the appeal of the place: a complete renovation. But every house needs upkeep and improvement. I did hire a guy to remove a ton of junk from underneath the house, to facilitate other work, but that’s about it.

• Attic infestation: We hear something scrabbling around up there from time to time, but we’re not sure exactly what it might be. I suspect squirrels.
• Floor repair: I can live with the waviness, but the floors seem to have deteriorated beneath our feet. Some places are spongy, others we can now see light coming up from below. (The house sits on piers.) I don’t know that we can afford to do much, but I’m hoping to get some estimates.
• Insulate underneath: Still waiting to learn the results of the research at Musicians Village so I can make an informed decision about which method to use.
• Fill underneath: I’m not certain but I think we may need to put some dirt or sand under the house to minimize water pooling.
• Lattice deck: It would be nice to have some lattice around the bottom of our deck. This would prevent toddlers going under the house from the back yard, and it might stop the raccoons from coming into the yard.
• Glaze windows: Mostly we have vinyl replacement windows but there are a few older wooden windows, and one or two sashes don’t seem to be properly glazed.
• Paint porch: Already paint is wearing away from the front porch, and there’s lead paint beneath the latex, so that needs another coat pronto. I guess maybe this will be an annual or biannual task.
• Remediate strips: Speaking of lead paint, there are two narrow (1″) strips of flaking lead-based paint on either side of the house. It’s not really an area where we hang out, but it needs to be addressed.
• Organize study: I still haven’t quite finished unpacking and settling in to my office space at home. That last little bit kills me.
• Bike shed: I don’t think a prefab job will do the trick. I probably need to hire someone to build a little lean-to in the back (or possibly on the side of the house) preferably on a slab. It needs to be big enough to accommodate two or three bikes.
• Entry space: If I could get the bike out of the house and into a shed, we’d be able to make getter use of the space next to our stairs. A coat rack might work well there.
• Window treatments: I’ve put up one set of blinds (2″ wooden) and one curtain (sheer, purple) in the girl’s room, but the rest of the house is bare. We have a couple newspapers taped up strategically in our bedroom. This might be an opportunity to inject a little excitement into the rather bland, er, I mean classy color scheme we inherited.
• Outdoor speakers: I’m constantly moving our Sony jambox from the kitchen to the deck and back again, while making sure the extension cord and wireless receiver don’t come unplugged. I fantasize about installing a set of speakers to the exterior.
• New couch: The futon couch in our living room isn’t cutting it.
• Futon stopper: Speaking of the futon, wherever it ends up, we need something to stop it from gouging into the wall.
• Tree trim: The tree in front of our house needs a trim. It’s way to tall for me to even think about doing it myself.
• Sidewalk repair: The sidewalk in front of our house is in sad shape, mostly from the tree roots. They have not only caused the sidewalk to crack and crumble into a wildly uneven and dangerous surface, they’ve also lifted the sidewalk up considerably. I’m not sure what a repaired sidewalk would even look like.
• More concrete: Our driveway consists of two narrow concrete strips, one for each tire. It’s hard to line our car wheels up properly, and it’s also hard to wheel the trash can down to the curb, so I’m thinking we’d do well to fill in the space between the strips.

One of the joys of home ownership is there’s always something to do. I plan to take a week off soon and tackle at least a few of these.

Perhaps I was inspired by all the art we saw yesterday, because when I got home I made a video by pairing a clip I shot Thursday night with a serendipitous musical track.

I’ve embedded the video below, but I had to make it smaller to fit my rather narrow template. You’d do better to watch on Youtube, and crank up the resolution.

I was leafing through Lagniappe today and came across an article by Doug MacCash, about a guy named Charlie Bishop who noticed a hunk of concrete in City Park and labeled it a sculpture. As far as I can tell, no one else has bought into this idea, except possibly MacCash, who labels Bishop a “conceptual artist.” Marcel Duchamp is cited as a precedent.

I thought this was just about the coolest thing I’d read in a while.

Persephone was sitting on my lap as I read. She pointed to the accompanying picture and asked “What’s that?”

So I attached her seat to the old bicycle and we made our way to City Park in search of this (possible) sculpture. I wasn’t confident that we’d be able to find it. I told Persephone we’d have to hunt for it. As we rode around the park I kept asking her if she saw it. Her consistent reply: “Everywhere.” I’m not sure exactly what she meant by that. Perhaps she was saying the park itself was a work of art. Perhaps she was simply trying to one-up Bishop and Duchamp.

But, amazingly enough, we found it.

I have to agree with Bishop. This thing does have a certain resonance. It does have a “sad and lonely” feel. I didn’t think it was “tragically ugly,” though. I found it beautiful.

After our visit to Koan (Bishop’s proposed name for the piece) we went over the footbridge to the playground, and after a while we ended up in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden. It’s free, and as anyone who’s been there will attest, it’s fantastic. Persephone was particularly taken by the giant three-sided Rodrigue blue (and red and yellow) dog.

But personally I thought Koan ranked right up there with the acknowledged sculptures in Besthoff. I hope that City Park has the fortitude and imagination to label Koan as a sculpture. Furthermore, I hope they credit Bishop as the artist, rather than follow his suggestion of Anonymous.

True, he didn’t make it, but he recognized it, and he deserves some credit for making us see the world around us with fresh eyes.

The concrete structure that is Koan was once a “plug” that was used to fill a cavity in a tree. As MacCash writes, “In time, the tree disappeared, though the plug remains.” I couldn’t help but notice a number of other such sculptures appear to be in progress in the immediate vicinity. Some might take a hundred years to come into their glory. Others, not so long.

Perhaps some day there will be an entire collection here. It might be called the Bishop Sculpture Garden.

Stranger things have happened.

In the meantime, a tip of the hat to Doug MacCash for writing an article that quite literally made my day, and my daughter’s too. And hats off to Charlie Bishop. You rock.

We went to a release party for the new issue of The Trumpet last night. I remember attending some of the first meetings of the Neighborhoods Partnership Network back in 2006, but I’ve been out of the loop lately.

So it was a great pleasure to take Xy and our daughter to the Community Book Center. We enjoyed free food from Lil Dizzy’s and we were regaled by tales of Adella Adella the Storyteller.

But the best part of the evening, for me, came when I went to the restroom. I should mention that the Community Book Center caters to a mostly African-American clientele, and their inventory reflects an orientation (by no means exclusive) to black literature.

Therefore I was mightily amused when I made my way back to the restroom and saw a door marked “colored only.” I wasn’t sure what was behind that door, but I had a laugh. Then I made use of the restroom, which was located next door and standing wide open.

When I came out, I saw a young boy of maybe eight or ten years who had wandered back there.

“Which one did you use?” he asked.

“What? I —”

Then I turned around and saw that in fact the door of the restroom I’d just used also had a sign. And what do you suppose it said…?

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I used the ‘white only’ restroom.”

The little boy smiled. “You don’t have to, you know.”

I’m sure my parents will be proud to know I’m now the number one result for mandatory ejaculation on Google. Or rather, one of my photos is.

Of course, the real blame goes to the Krewe of Spermes, one of the many constituent subkrewes that make up the amazing Krewe de Vieux. All I did was take a picture of their float with a friend’s camera.

Do I need to explain the reference? This float made its appearance in February of 2006, five months or so after the first mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. I mentioned this parade back then but ironically I featured to a different photo of the same float.

My question is — why are people suddenly searching for “mandatory ejaculation” such that I’m seeing it in my stats?

Is there something we should know?

I was recently thrilled, honored, flattered and otherwise gratified to learn that I’ve been nominated for an Ashley Morris Award. I’m not worthy to actually win — besides which, the competition is far too stiff. But merely to be considered makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

The award is of course presented at the Rising Tide conference, of which I am a big fan. The upcoming Rising Tide V will mark the fifth anniversary of Katrina. I’ve been at each one since the first, and it’s gotten bigger and better each year. I’m sure this one will be the greatest yet. It may in fact be the pinnacle. It remains to be seen whether the spirit behind Rising Tide and other such post-Katrina endeavors will sustain past the five-year mark. Hopefully it will continue onward and upward in perpetuity, but only time will tell.

Most if not all of the people organizing Rising Tide are bloggers, but I wouldn’t describe it as a “blogger conference” per se. To think of it as such would miss the point. After all, anyone and everyone’s got a blog these days. What brings these people together, and what makes this special, is their passion for the city of New Orleans. That’s why the Ashley Morris award is given to someone who “embodies Ashley’s fierce passionate defense of New Orleans, its people and its culture.” Moreover, these are smart and engaged people, and that shows through in the quality of the programming.

Rising Tide is far from a dry, academic affair, but it does have a high level of intellectual vigor. I’d really hoped we could host this event here at the University, and I’d nearly managed to get it approved, but a scheduling conflict proved irresolvable. No matter. The Howlin’ Wolf will be a fine venue. If you are interested in the future of New Orleans, I hope to see you there.

Register now.

The mayor came to our campus yesterday to deliver a speech with the theme “Eyes Wide Open.” Strangely enough, few of my co-workers seemed to be aware of this, but I got an invite from the mayor’s office via e-mail. By another strange coincidence, I’d forgotten all about it until my memory was jogged during a meeting with Councilmember Kristin Palmer at City Hall about the Lafitte Corridor greenway project. I rode back to campus and got there in time to catch the speech.

The University Center ballroom was packed. Music was playing, which I thought was prerecorded until I noticed a number of men in suits on microphones at the front of the room — the Zion Harmonizers. Father Tony gave the invocation and Dr. Francis introduced the mayor.

For me, it was pretty cool to see all these guys on the same stage in such a familiar setting. It was cool to see the City’s seal on front of the podium and the University’s seal in back. Also, I’d never heard Mitch Landrieu speak before, and I’ve got to say he’s pretty good at it.

I’ve made it a point not to offer my own analysis of local politics here recently, and I think I’ll stick to that policy. However, I’d be curious to know what others might think. Here’s the text of the speech.
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I guess the official date is in April but I took my daughter to work yesterday. She was here about five hours, and we had a blast.

We always call her daycare “school.” Xy is a teacher and I work at a university, so we all go to school. Actually my girls are both on summer vacation now, but I still go to “Dada’s school” every day.

Xy had a teacher meeting yesterday so I decided it would be a good time to bring her on campus with me for a change of pace. We packed a lunch together: carrot, apple, and cheese sandwiches. I pushed her to campus in a stroller, and let me tell you it’s a harrowing experience. Not the most pedestrian-friendly part of town. Did you know the intersection of Palmetto and Carrollton is the busiest in Orleans Parish? But we arrived safely at last.

She got to meet a bunch of people — mostly librarians — and we practiced saying “good morning” in a nice clear voice instead of mumbling shyly. We read seven books from the children’s section. We rode the elevators and climbed the stairs. We ate our lunch in the “tonfrence room” and she decided that she doesn’t like horseradish sauce or Tabasco.

She spotted the John Scott sculpture from the window, which led to a very pleasant walking tour of the quad, plus she learned a new word: sculpture. We looked at a bunch of them.

But her favorite activity, without question, was drawing on the dry-erase board.

Sometime a few months ago this slipped past me: I’ve now spent a quarter of my life in the city of New Orleans, a quarter of my life working at the University. And it dawned on me that my experience of this city is very much bound up with my employment at this school. I’ve lived in three different house and an apartment, in three different districts; Xy has taught at six different schools (soon to be seven); we’ve seen friends come and go, moved in various circles, taken care of nigh on a dozen cats, and brought forth progeny of our own — but the one constant has been working here. I recently joked that I’ve been in this same office over three decades. Silly but true: I started here in ’99, worked through the Aughts, and now it’s the Teens. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve thoroughly cleaned my office once over all this time. But all kidding aside, this has been a source of great stability in my life, and I am very glad to be here. I can’t imagine how different New Orleans might seem if my job situation was different.

I also missed my annual observance of my start date on the first of June, marking eleven years here at the University. Looking back in the archives I found this remark from 2004:

I’m trying to imagine where I’ll be five years from now. I’ll be 42. Bush will no longer be president. Other than that, little is certain. I imagine myself still living in New Orleans, still working at the University, still hanging with Xy, still producing ROX.

When you put it that way, life just doesn’t sound very exciting. But there are bound to be plenty of surprises too.

Granted, I really should have cited this last year when I was 42. But it’s not too late to observe that, indeed, there have been a few surprises along the way. Most notable among them was the failure in 2005 of the floodwalls on the outfall canals that drain water out of the city, allowing the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood my neighborhood and my home and a few hundred thousand others as well. We commonly refer to this phenomenon as “Katrina,” but that’s a sort of misleading shorthand.

I was going to mention my daughter as well, but she is not a “surprise,” technically. She was planned. But she is full of surprises. And I did not anticipate her when imagining my future six years ago.

PS: As an added bonus, here’s a picture I took of myself eleven years ago at my office.

This was taken on July 15, 1999, to be precise. I think this may be the first picture I ever took with a digital camera. It was an Apple QuickTake 200. I wonder whatever happened to it?

Many months ago, we booked a condo in Panama City Beach, Florida. (I should say, my mother-in-law booked the place. We consulted, but it was my in-laws’ dime.) This was well before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, long before oil started gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico. Needless to say of all the anguish caused by this disaster, my family vacation plans do not factor prominently. Yet still I worried about it. News reports indicated no oil there — until about a week before our trip. A piece of the Deepwater Horizon rig washed up on the beach there. And then came reports of tarballs. In the final days before our departure, I was reading up on public health advisories, effects of dispersant chemicals on toddlers, varying accounts of the situation on the ground (or in the water) in Panama City Beach, and all manner of online monitoring sites. It was maddeningly difficult, impossible really, to come to any kind of conclusion.

I decided if we saw tarballs we would keep our daughter out of the Gulf waters. Dispersant is not so easily detected by the human eye, of course. Once we got there, we found the water crystal clear. I scouted for tarballs constantly but never saw one.

In the end, it turns out I needn’t have worried so much. I think our girl spent no more than an hour in actual contact with the waters of the Gulf for a variety of reasons. On the morning of our first full day there, Xy took her down to the beach and was holding her when a wave knocked her down. That scared Persephone and she preferred the pool from that point forward. Later in the week the waves got increasingly rough as Hurricane Alex churned through the Gulf, and the water was closed for swimming anyway.

We had a great time regardless.

Here are some other random notes.

It’s just over 300 miles from NOLA to PCB. This was our first long trip in the hybrid vehicle, and I was curious to see how it performed. It took less than a tank of gas to get there, and we got about 30 miles per gallon.

We stayed at the Wyndham. I’m sure I’m not the first person to gaze skeptically upon all those highrise beachfront resorts, but you can’t beat a balcony looking over the ocean. Unfortunately we couldn’t get a two-bedroom accommodation so my in-laws were in a separate condo not far from ours, but it worked out all right.

We were there for six full days, bookended by two half-days for arrival and departure — a week. Of those six full days, two were sunny and spectacular, two were overcast with a little rain, and two had heavy rain. (Thanks Alex.)

I took almost 400 photos. I’ve posted a set of the best on Flickr. (Friends and family see more.)

Internet connectivity was problematic and aggravating. I took a laptop from work, which I hooked up to Ethernet in our condo. I enjoyed unfettered net access for two days — and then it just stopped working for no apparent reason. The problem was not the Ethernet but the laptop I was using. A couple guys on the staff came out and tried to troubleshoot but ultimately we were unsuccessful. So I used the wifi network, in a common area not far from our condo, but that proved unreliable as well. The network had a tendency to disappear suddenly for no apparent reason, leaving me disconnected. Thus I was unable to participate in the “Contemplative Neuroscience” webinar which was my ostensible reason for bringing the laptop in the first place.

I finished reading On Blue’s Waters and and started In Green’s Jungles.

I called the front desk and they sent up a pack-n-play crib where Persephone slept comfortably most of the time. On her first night she was restless and ended up in our bed while I moved out to the couch. (I needn’t have bothered as the king-sized mattress was big enough for the three of us.) She had a nightmare one other night, but the rest of the time she was happy to sleep in “little bed.”

We missed the Hands Across the Sands event, alas. We could have walked there.

My friend MAD, who used to live in PCB, recommended a number of local venues. We only went out to eat one night, and we tried a couple waterfront places he mentioned but the lines were way too long for us. We ended up at Scampy’s which proved to be quite delicious. There was no wait for dining on the patio, which I found incredible. Who wants to sit in a dark dining room on beautiful summer evening?

Our friends DJ, Daisy and Lavender joined us for the last two nights. I didn’t think they were going to make it, but they got there just in time for the worst of the Alex weather. Then they stayed a couple nights after we left at a hotel.

My mother-in-law Susie cooked all the major meals. Actually Xy did cook grits and grillades one night. I meant to prepare stuffed peppers but I forgot my recipe and Susie ended up doing that as well. I probably gained some weight on this vacation.

Another contributing factor: We went through one bottle each of Averna, Bombay Sapphire, St. Germain, Hennessy and Limoncello, plus half a bottle of Amaretto and some wine and beer. Key cocktails: Vertigo, Extended Roman Holiday, Horse’s Neck, St. Germain & Soda, and the good old gin & tonic (with and without St. Germain).

My favorite moment of the whole trip was when Persephone and I built a sand castle on the beach one evening. She was crushing towers as quickly as I could build them, until I managed to get a couple up in quick succession. Suddenly she got the idea — this could be a place where Cinderella might live. Soon she was helping me build the walls, and before you knew it we had a most, a tunnel, a bridge, and a domed ballroom. It didn’t look like much to be honest, but in our eyes it was a palace.

Getting back to my original concern, I want to re-emphasize that I never saw a single tarball. There’s probably a good deal of variation up and down the beach, and who knows what tomorrow will bring. I also want to be clear that I think environmental issues are of primary importance to us all. I wouldn’t want to discount concerns about what’s happening in the Gulf right now. I believe it’s a crisis of epic proportions.

Obviously we must be on guard against paranoia. When the water was closed to swimming and a plane came by dragging a banner that said “STAY OUT OF THE GULF” it was hard not to feel alarmed. My father-in-law spoke to another guest at the resort who was sure the closure was oil-related — yet I am certain it was because of the weather.

Which is not to say that there was no oil. There’s a persistent trough of foam that develops between the first and second set of breaks. My mother-in-law said she thought it looked funny, sort of discolored, toward the later half of our stay, and she suspected it was because of oil. I was skeptical, but when Daisy arrived she said the same thing, and she’s a geologist after all. So who knows, maybe there was something to that.

And as far as I know you can’t see dispersant, and no one is testing for it, and no one really knows how dangerous it might be to humans. But that Corexit stuff BP was using was banned in the UK.

All of which gets back to my original point about the difficulty of getting truly reliable information about what’s going on out there. We can only make good decisions if we have good information, but there’s very few sources that I trust anymore.

Every year I exhort people to listen to the stirring inspirational lyrics penned by Dr. Paul of the Troublemakers for their famous anthem. But many people never do. So this year, I thought I’d transcribe them. I don’t believe these were available anywhere on the internet — until now. Maybe this will help people get the message.

We might get arrested we might get spit on
So here is a song to explain our point of view
We’ll explain why it so thrills us to see
All those colorful flags being set on fire

On the fourth of July we declare our independence
Independence from the greatest evil around
That is the evil of nationalism
It separates us and crushes us down

Flag-Burning Day, Flag-Burning Day
Burning the scourge of nationalism away
Flag-Burning Day, Flag-Burning Day
Happy International Flag-Burning Day

We burn the stars and the stripes and the map’ leaf
The Palestinian and Israeli flags
The hammer and the sickle and the lone star of Texas
We love to dance around those smoldering rags

Flag-Burning Day, Flag-Burning Day
Burning those hateful borders away
Flag-Burning Day, Flag-Burning Day
Happy International Flag-Burning Day

We declare that we are citizens of the whole world
Don’t pay no respect to no borders or armies
Because patriotism is the flip side of racism
Why we any better just because of where we’re born

Listen, then buy. This might be a good time to review your IFBD tips. Any questions?

Photo by Todd Ehlers. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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I recently got an invite to my 25th high school reunion, and I thought — twenty-five years?

Has it really been that long?

I guess it has.

I’m sure I’d enjoy it, but being as it’s a thousand miles away, I don’t plan to attend. I say that with full awareness that fate has a funny way of intervening in our plans. I didn’t plan to attend our 20th reunion either, but Katrina blew me northward. If I show up at the 25th reunion, it will be a very bad sign.

So I will wish all my classmates well from afar. I hope you have a good time at the reunion, and enjoy this set of 85 photos.

I’m quoted in this Gambit article by Sarah Eddington. I use big words like “maximal” and “expeditiously” and “stuff.”
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Summer is my favorite season. Take a brief vacation from reality with this summery mix.

I woke around dawn to the sound of heavy downpouring rain. After it kept up for a while, I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed, put on a pair of boxers, some sandals, and a baseball hat, and ran out to move the car up to the driveway. Xy tried to tell me it wasn’t necessary, but I’ve learned my lesson from last time. Of course, when I got back into bed, the rain seemed to taper off significantly, but hey — better safe than sorry, right?

Three or four hours later, when I went out the front door on my way to work, I discovered a huge tree limb had broken off the neighbor’s tree, a live oak, and landed in the street. This was no mere twig. It was massive enough to do serious damage. And it was in the exact spot where our car had been.

Dear Persephone,

When I ask how old you are, you’ve learned to say “two and a quarter.” But I guess now you’ll have to learn to say “two and a third.”

We’ve taken you out of the daycare for the summer so you are spending a lot of time with your mother. She took you out to a friend’s cabin in the country. It was going to be a weekend trip but you ended up staying for a whole week because you were having so much fun. But whenever you stubbed your toe or scraped your knee you cried for Dada.

You’ve often shown a preference for me over your mother in moments of crisis. Your mother theorizes that this is the natural order of things, but I think it’s because we’ve bonded more closely over the last year. Your mother was working very hard at a school with extended hours. That meant that I got you ready in the morning and took you to daycare; I picked you up in the afternoon; usually I put you to bed as well. But after a month or so spending more time with your mother, you are starting to call for her rather than me.

We do still spend quality time together of course. A couple weeks ago I took you to City Park. We walked around Big Lake and you chased the ducks. When it started to rain we took refuge in the New Orleans Museum of Art. I was surprised to discover a temporary exhibit on dinosaurs was being installed. There was a huge T. Rex skeleton in the main atrium. You were quite frightened of it at first. I sensed that was because of the way it loomed overhead, so I took you up to the second level. When we looked down at the T. Rex from above it wasn’t nearly as frightening. Soon you pronounced the T. Rex as “happy” and said it was your “friend.”

(You understand happy is opposed to sad, but I suspect you also regard it as the opposite of dead. I tried to allay your fears about the T. Rex by explaining it was dead. No, you decided, it was happy. And you’ve made some other remarks along those lines.)

Later I learned the dinosaurs weren’t part of an exhibit at all. They were props for a film that was being shot there.

What else? Recently at bedtime you’ve been requesting the story of “Sephie and the flowers” — the mythological story of your namesake. That’s pretty cool.

Against my better judgment, we recently bought a small above-ground pool. When I assembled it I was astonished at how well you took to the role of helper, bringing me the pieces I needed. Now you’re swimming almost every day.

You are fully into the so-called terrible twos. You have temper fits and meltdowns on a fairly regular basis. We are learning how to deal with such behavior as best we can. A short time out often works wonders for your disposition.

But even with your bouts of ill humor, you are still generally adorable and a joy to be around.

A few weeks back I had a bit of an educational experience. I can’t get into specifics, but I’m wondering if I might be able to abstract the essence.

A party approached a group that I work with asking for our support on a particular initiative. This party has considerable power and influence, and our little group does not — or so I thought. I was under the impression that the party in question would ultimately get what they wanted, whether we supported them or not. I thought it would behoove us to support their initiative so that we could develop a friendly relationship and perhaps steer them in a mutually beneficial direction.

When we sat down to talk about it, they revealed that they had already approached some governmental authorities about the matter at hand. The governmental authorities had deferred to our little group. I was a bit surprised by this. Our group has been working for some while to advance our cause. Apparently along the way we have gained a smidgen of influence. In some small way, we have successfully inserted ourselves into the political process. I felt pretty good about that.

Back to the initiative in question, which we were being asked to support. Suddenly my realpolitik rationale for supporting the initiative had evaporated. I was still inclined to say yes. By virtue of my profession I’m oriented to helping people. I’m in the habit of saying yes. Of course, that was a qualified yes. It would have to be cleared with the rest of the group.

Over the next few days, I and others in the group heard from our friends in various branches of government. Many of them were not pleased with the idea that we would support this initiative. Some were quite passionate on this point. They felt it would be a big mistake. The authority who had initially deferred to us was still deferential: “If your group doesn’t have a problem with this, then we don’t have a problem either.” But there was clearly some concern, and these concerns were spelled out to me in detail.

Finally, when our group met and discussed the issue, our consensus was clear. We decided not to support the initiative. The reasons were various but above all there was a matter of long-standing principle which I’d neglected to consider. I had to backpedal a bit, since I had initially indicated that we could support the initiative, but it was not too difficult to explain our position to all interested parties.

So what did I learn after all of that? Clearly, it’s easier to stand by your principles if you’ve got solid footing. But it seems there’s something more. I guess I could put it like this: You can insert yourself into the political process, but the political process will also be inserted into you.

We’ve taken Persephone out of daycare for the summer. Xy’s finally having some time to bond with her, which is a refreshing change after this last school year.

Xy found a new job about a month ago. The bad news is it’s still classroom teaching. She’ll be teaching fourth-grade science and social studies at a small Catholic school on the West Bank. Remember it is the policy of this blog not mention our employers by name, so don’t ask. This represents a $20K pay cut but hopefully she will be happier or at least less miserable. While it’s been nice not to have to worry about money lately, I’ll take a happier spouse any day. A little belt-tightening won’t hurt us.

Xy says she’s going to look at the world through rose-colored lenses. Thus this picture:

In other Xy news, her rollergirl dreams seem to have run aground. She got a knee injury a couple months ago that prevented her from qualifying for the team or skating at all. As she’s healed up, though, she’s come to realize she can’t handle the time commitment. Most players practice at least twice a week, often three or four times, and then there are the bouts themselves. That’s a lot, but it’s what’s need to be competitive. She had a lot of fun but at this point it looks doubtful that “Smallpox” will ever make her debut.

My daughter and I enjoyed a fine outing to the park and museum Sunday, but when we came home the house was strangely quiet. No music playing in the living room. No music in the kitchen. Xy said it had stopped a couple hours earlier. I checked my computer, whence the music flows, and it was completely unresponsive. I powered down, but when I powered back up, the system didn’t start. The screen displayed a flashing folder icon, something I haven’t seen in many years — since before the advent of OS X, I’m thinking.

My exact words at that moment do not bear repeating.

After trying a couple tricks without success, I hunted down my Snow Leopard system disk and booted from that, then ran Disk First Aid. The hard drive was looking funky. I tried to repair the disk, and it made a few repairs, but after reporting an “invalid node structure” it crapped out and gave up. A second try yielded even quicker results: “invalid B-tree node size.” The program advised me to backup all data and reformat the drive.

A stunned and sickened feeling descended over me as I contemplated the possibility of losing data. That 320 GB hard drive is chock full and has never been fully backed up. I didn’t think it was very important as I tend to put my most important files online in some form or another.

The big exception to that is my music collection. It has taken me years to assemble that, from diverse sources, and there are many tracks that are rare to the point of being literally irreplaceable. I could certainly never recreate that music library from scratch.

And yet, in a strange way, it felt like it could almost be liberating. Curating such a large collection (35K tracks at last count) has consumed a lot of time and attention over the years, especially if you are as anal as I am about meta-data. Occasionally that feels oppressive — as if the collection is managing me rather than the other way around.

Still I was in a state of shock. It occurred to me that I was experiencing the cyber equivalent of either a seizure or a stroke — I wasn’t sure which yet, but I was hoping for a seizure and a quick return to normal.

I called the good old Computer Shoppe, but they are on vacation until next week. The only other option I was aware of was the Apple Store, and I sure didn’t want to go there.

I shelled out a hundred bucks for DiskWarrior. The startup disk is in the mail, but I was able to use my downloaded copy on a laptop to fix my iMac’s hard drive. At first it seemed to work, but the drive continues to have problems, and even when fixed they seem to come back. Must be some bad sectors. I currently can boot up into safe mode only, otherwise I get the “Blue Screen of Death.” And I thought that only happened with Windows. Actually this particular manifestation isn’t even acknowledged by Apple for the Snow Leopard version of OS X. It’s supposed to be a “Gray Screen of Death.” Go figure.

Still, I’m able to boot into safe mode, which is better than nothing. I got a 1TB external hard drive, a LaCie d2 quadra, which arrived with lightning speed from Newegg.com. Yesterday I was able to back up the problem drive using Time Machine. Over the Firewire 800 connection, it only took a couple hours or so to archive 300 GB.

So now I have a little peace of mind. I probably need to reformat the drive now and then restore my data from the backup. The prospect of which makes me only a little nervous.

Update: I did try reformatting the drive but it continued to have trouble. A few days after writing this, it seems to have died the death. The iMac is currently at the Computer Shoppe where I expect they’ll replace the drive unless they find something else amiss. I’d love to replace it myself but after reading up on the subject I decided that’s a little much for me.