Anger is an energy

Midterm elections are coming up in a few weeks, and there's no denying that anger is going to play a role.  Though so far, a lot of this anger only seems to be coming from one end of the political spectrum.

I'm not going to get into the reasons for this anger, stated or real.  Partly because if you've bought into the anger you really don't need someone else telling you why you're angry, and if you haven't bought into it, there's plenty of information out there about it already.  And partly because writing about right-wing anger will just make me...angry.

Back in college I attended a lecture held by a professional writer - that is, a guy who one or more times in the past had received actual money in exchange for something he wrote.  It was a mostly unmemorable and unremarkable lecture.  Only one thing has stuck with me:  he gave a warning about writing pornography.  Writing pornography can be very easy, seductively so.  And it can pay very well.  But he warned that once you go down that path, you may find it very difficult to write anything else.

Anger can be like that.  It feels empowering at first, as though by putting on this cloak of flames you actually gain extra strength.  But soon anger becomes all-consuming:  it feeds on itself, and demands greater and greater levels of anger to sustain the same feeling of empowerment, until in the end anger is all you've got left.

I've called on people to get angry before.  Maybe that was wrong.  Maybe that was exactly right.  Maybe if more people had gotten angry then, the problems that are causing so much anger now would never have come into existence.  More likely, the right-wing pundits who are fanning the flames of anger now would simply have found other things to manufacture anger around.

I tried my hand at angry writing once, nearly five and a half years ago.  Right after the start of the second disastrous George W. Bush administration.  Right after the time when the electorate should have heaved the idiot Bush and the criminal scumbag Cheney and all of their cronies and co-conspirators and fellow criminals and their entire Rubberstamp Republican Congress out of office, but instead decided to hand them the keys to the car once again, perhaps hoping that they wouldn't simply drive the country into a wall or off a cliff this time.  The election of 2004 was a huge error made by many of the same people who are so full of anger today.  But back then they weren't angry, I was.  And so I created the Angry Political Blog.  I was amazed I was able to get the site name, but I did.  Now I had it, and it was mine, and nobody else's.  I was going to use it as a place to vent my anger, to rage at the political stupidity I had witnessed and was witnessing.

I wrote one post.

And then I felt the anger gripping me.  I found myself wanting to rip into those who had made the stupid decisions that had led us to this point - literally as well as in writing.  I found it difficult to write anything else.  I telegraphed out a few other posts for Another Monkey while I struggled with what to rant about first on Angry Political Blog.

And then I made the decision to set aside that anger and go on doing what I had been doing all the while.

Maybe that was a mistake.  Maybe if I had run with it I could have made more of a difference.  Perhaps not.  The Republican stranglehold on Congress would be broken in the midterm election in 2006.  And with Barack Obama's election in 2008, the long, difficult work of undoing the damage caused by the George W. Bush administration could start.  It wouldn't be fast, and it wouldn't be easy.  Some of us might have hoped otherwise - even I had hoped for a "sea change," a revolution in attitude catalyzed by the election of Barack Obama.

That didn't happen.  Instead of a bottom-up change, we're seeing incremental top-down change.  It's taking a lot longer than anyone would have wished, with the exception of and largely due to the efforts of Congressional Republicans, who have fought against any meaningful change every step of the way - since any dramatic improvements to the economy, employment, or any other measurable metric of national health would benefit the majority Democrats more than the minority Republicans.  And now the same individuals who have fought against recovery - remember Rush Limbaugh and "I hope he fails" when asked about his hopes for the Obama presidency? - are using the slowness of the recovery as a talking point for increasing voter anger.

Angry right-wing voters are going to go to the polls in November.  Everyone else should be scared - and maybe they should be angry, too.  We fought hard to get to this point, to break the dreamed-of "Permanent Republican Majority" and replace it with a truly American dream.  We fought hard to get rid of the idiots who set this country on a course for disaster, and replace them with people who might actually have a chance of getting us out of this mess.  But the Republicans screwed the national pooch hard, hard enough that it couldn't be unscrewed in a little more than a year and a half.  And because of that, we are now in danger of having Congressional leadership handed back to those very same Republican idiots, or their even more extreme successors who associate themselves with the "Tea Party."  Are you willing to let that happen?


TITLE REFERENCE:  "Rise" by Public Image Ltd.



That wild-eyed young fellow in that video is John Lydon.  You may remember him as Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols.  This video is from 1986.

Big dangerous day

Last night was the last night of this rotation, and the end of another sixty-hour calendar week of work.  I go back on Monday night for overtime and then work a regular rotation of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights for my last week of what you could call "easy sixty" - the following four calendar weeks will only have three workdays each, so I will have to work two overtime days in the same calendar week to get in sixty hours (and earn seventy hours of pay.)

I would have loved to go right to sleep when I got home, but that wasn't in the cards.  I absolutely needed to get out my insurance paperwork today, and before I could do that I needed to get one item notarized.  I finished filling out all the necessary forms, scanned everything and saved it as image files, made some pancakes, and started to look for Notaries Public who were open on a Saturday.

It's not that easy.  Some didn't answer their phones, and some didn't seem to have phones.  Ditto for the local post offices, but I was fairly confident that the Wilkes-Barre post office would be open into the afternoon.

I was going through the phone book and my eyes fell on one familiar location.  I looked at the address.  It wasn't nearby, but it was close to the comic book store, and I was planning on going there anyway.  I called them, and they would be open for another hour-and-a-half.  Just enough time for me to get ready, hit an ATM for some cash, and get myself up there.  And then go to the comic book store.

All with no sleep.

The pancakes helped, as did three or four mugs of coffee and a shower.  My car stalled once along the way, as the World's Longest Traffic Light finally changed from red to green with me at the start of a parade, but for all I know that might have been my fault - I may have accidentally knocked the car into neutral or something.  I made it to the notary with fifteen minutes to spare.

Along the way I listened to a new radio station.  92.1 FM has variously played easy listening, classic rock, oldies, and Christmas Carols in the past, but on the way back from taking Homer to the vet in Allentown, while scanning stations for something that wasn't playing solid crap or solid commercials, I stumbled across its new format: easy listening classic oldies alternative.

http://www.radiofm921.com/

I have to admit, I feel like a hypocrite listening to this station.  I can't stand the thought of alternative as a nostalgia act.  If this were a college radio station, I might be complaining that they're ignoring current bands and modern music, like "Bloodbuzz Ohio" by The National, in favor of playing stuff from the 90's.  But they do play some more recent songs by bands like Paramore and Finger Eleven.  Oddly, for just listening for a few hours, I've heard a lot of repeated songs - I'm listening right now on the online stream to "Dammit" by Blink 182, which I just heard this afternoon.  (Excuse me for a minute, they're now playing "Cherub Rock" by Smashing Pumpkins.)  On top of everything else, the station appears to be a robot station playing a satellite feed with no DJ's or other local presence beyond the occasional commercial.

After getting my stuff notarized and adding some oil to my engine just for luck (it goes through about a quart a month, but what do you expect from a fourteen year old car that still gets better than 40 miles to the gallon?), I made my way along Wyoming Avenue past the site of the Battle of Wyoming and into West Pittston and finally to the comic book store.  There was a sale going on there, but I couldn't rouse myself to spend any more money than what I had already committed to with my pull list. Then I remembered something else:  I needed a haircut.  Fortunately, Sam (the comic book guy)'s wife Rose has an attached beauty shop in the back, and she also does haircuts.  So I turned a twofer into a threefer, and got three things accomplished in one trip.

Having zinged east through the Wyoming Valley to do all this, I then zanged back west towards Nanticoke to get to the Wilkes-Barre post office to mail my packet of forms, receipts, and bills.  This went off without incident.  I then decided that while I was out already, I may as well make a few more stops at a Home Depot (which does not sell any sort of home security stuff, by the way) and a pet supply store to get cat food.  (All, still, without sleep.)

I somehow managed to do all this and get home without crashing my car or running anyone over.  It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do.

I slept from 4:00 to 10:00 and have been up since.  (Now they're playing "Six Underground" by Sneaker Pimps for the second time today - I heard it as I pulled away from the post office at about 2:00.  Ah, well, I am sort of in love with Kelli Ali, so that's a good thing.)  Tomorrow I'll go to church in the morning, then give blood, pick up some groceries for next week's rotation of work, and then do some stuff with the things I picked up from Home Depot.  And then start the cycle all over again.

I note the passing of time

Time passes differently for me than it does for most people...I think.

I work twelve-hour night shifts.  Four days out of every eight, with overtime when I can get it.  On days when I am working, I effectively "do not exist."  There is very little That I can do outside of working, commuting, eating, sleeping, and getting ready for work.  For people who work "normal" eight- or nine-hour days* the afternoon provides plenty of opportunities to go shopping, mow the lawn, do projects around the house, and so on.**  But for me, and for other people on my schedule, all our "afternoons" have to be crammed into our days off, which are also the equivalent of other people's "weekends."  Overtime, of course, takes away from these available days.

The odd thing is, my perception of time tends to leapfrog over working days.  Work is work, a thing I do for money in a windowless, brightly-lit room.  Any day is very like another, even though every day brings its own weird problems.  But on the outside world the grass grows, the leaves change, the rain and snow fall.  People have birthdays, anniversaries.  Holidays march along.  I switch into work mode one day and four or five or six days later I switch out of it and see that the world has moved along.

My house was robbed nearly two months ago.  That may seem like a long time ago to you, but to me only two weeks or so seem to have passed.  Temperatures have gone in that time from too hot to paint outside to too cold to paint outside, which means my porch will probably have to wait until next year to get painted.  When I had security consultants stop by in August to review my situation, I felt ridiculous for still having my decorated Christmas tree up in a corner of a room; now, with less than two months to go until I would normally put it up, it seems ridiculous to take it down.

I don't feel like I'm getting older, but I know I must be, because I see everyone around me getting older, and I see entropy having its way with the things around me.  I see longer-term changes, too, in society, in the economy, in the environment, things that other people might not notice as they are absorbed in their own day-to-day business.***  The first gray hairs started to appear in my moustache in Spring 2006, during my last visit to Ireland. (When I was having dinner with my sister and a friend of hers the day of my return, my sister tried to discretely inform me that I had something on my moustache, under my nose; I had to tell her that those were gray hairs, not nasal discharge.)  Now my goatee is streaked with silver, giving me a distinguished look that may be either beneficial or detrimental during my upcoming job search.

Time has passed even as I have written this.  And now it is time for me to wrap this up, as I have places to go and things to do.



*Note to any readers in France:  yes, this is considered "normal" around these parts.
**But you are not able to go to the bank or post office.  These things are reserved for the unemployed.
***In a discussion of the current terror threat in Europe, I heard a CNN anchor say to an expert who had just referred to "Mumbai-style attacks" that many people might not recall the terrorist attack in Mumbai in late 2008.  Really?  Is that even possible?

TITLE REFERENCE:  Line from "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" by Talking Heads, from their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues.  1983, twenty-seven years ago...

Broken habit

Once upon a time I used to write a blog post every day.  Sometimes more than one.  Sometimes I would cheat a bit and pre- or post-date the post by a few hours.  Occasionally I would miss a day.

My dog died and I kept on posting.  My father died and I kept on posting.

My house was robbed and I got knocked off track.

Part of that was a deliberate decision.  I was probably oversharing things about my schedule, giving too much information about when I would be at work and when I would be away, information that potential burglars might, in theory, find useful.  (Ironically, my house was robbed on a day when I was not working, near the end of a longish stretch when I had been laid off and had been spending an until-then unprecedented amount of time at the house photographing the Saturn-Mars-Venus trio.)

Part of that is a direct consequence of the robbery.  Even though my homeowner's insurance - which will probably have a higher premium next year, thanks to the robbery - will cover the cost of the window and the copper pipes and (I think) the more than 10,000 gallons of water that flowed into a floor drain, there is still the matter of a $500 deductible.  Add in the cost of having a security system installed (which was done last week, after a lengthy audition process), and the monthly monitoring of the system, and the extra little alarms and locks and other security devices I've installed around the house, and it becomes clear that the collateral costs of responding to this robbery exceed the cost of replacing the stolen pipes themselves.  (As for how much the scumbags who robbed my house got for the pipes they stole, I probably spent that much on my first trip to Lowe's for alarms and locks and wire mesh and lag screws - and I've made several more trips since then.)

But all this requires money.  And for the last few weeks, I have had a marvelous moneymaking opportunity opened to me.  It's called "overtime."

Here's how it works.  My company laid off a huge number of my fellow employees back in August, including a bunch of people who did what I do.  Things were slow, so they also temporarily laid off a lot of us who weren't permanently laid off for the first few weeks of August.  (That was when my house was robbed.)  But then things got busier sometime in September, and they now needed more employees than they had to get the work done.  (There's also the matter of filling in for employees on sick leave and vacation.)  So since that time overtime has been available.

Overtime will pay time-and-a-half for every hour that you work over 40 in a calendar week.  Say you're working a 36-hour week, which happens four weeks out of every eight when you work a four-day-on, four day off twelve-hour day (or night) schedule*.   Your fourth day of work - your first day of overtime worked within the same calendar week as those three days of a 36-hour week - will pay straight time for the first four hours, and then time and a half for the next eight, giving you fifty-two hours of pay for forty-eight hours of work.  (This is also the starting point for any four-day week; your last day is paid at time-and-a-half after the first four hours.)  The second overtime day (or first, if you started with a four-day week) within the same calendar week is pure overtime, an additional eighteen hours of pay for twelve hours worked, for a total of seventy hours of pay for sixty hours of work. Your sixth day worked in the same calendar week will get you eighty-eight hours of pay for seventy-two hours worked, and your seventh day (if you can manage to get it) will pay one hundred and six hours in exchange for a mere eighty-four hours of your life.

I need the money, so I'm taking as much overtime as I can get and can handle.  This past week that was two days.  Maybe at some point in the future I'll try for three.  Of course, every penny I'm earning is already spoken for, courtesy of the robbery and my response to it and veterinarian's bills and accumulating credit card debt.  And in the very near future I'm looking at being permanently laid off.  I should be conducting a job search now, and actually got a job suggestion from a local politician back at the Blogger/Politician Mixer a few weeks ago, but I've been too busy with overtime and house-related stuff to do anything like that.

Or even to blog. 

I miss blogging.  I miss doing my daily posts.  I miss keeping up with all of my fellow-bloggers, and I just realized that even though I have read everyone's current posts, there are many other posts from the recent past that  I haven't caught up with.

My house now has a monitored security system, so that's one set of stresses that have been slightly alleviated.  Homer, I believe, is on the mend.  And whether I like it or want it or need it or not, overtime will not last forever.  (Nor will my job.)  Someday I may get back into the habit of doing a post a day.  Someday soon, I hope.



*Rotations that begin on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday are 36-hour weeks - these three rotations actually cover four calendar weeks with three twelve-hour days each.  It doesn't sound right, but try working it out for yourself on a calendar and you'll see that it's true.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Republican Election Strategies

The other day at work I noticed a small stack of photocopied items sitting on a counter where I needed to pick something up.  Being a compulsive reader I began to scan the message to see what it was about.  It started out:

Can this be really true???>

I checked this out and it is true. There will be a 1% transaction tax on any financial transaction with the exception of purchase and sale of stock.
If we make a $500 ATM withdrawal, we will pay $5 tax, and $300 on a $30,000 car purchase.

"You can take one, if you want," the person at the counter said. "I don't know who left them there."

"I'll check it out on Snopes and see if it's true," I said.

Now, one of my pet peeves with forwarded junk like this is when the message says something like "I checked this out on snopes" and then when you ask the person who forwarded it to you if they had actually checked it out on Snopes they'll reply, "Oh, no, I just copied that text from the e-mail I got."  In this case the message is in an anonymous photocopy that looks like it was edited from an e-mail.  Very old-school, really, from back in the days when photocopies and faxes were the preferred methods of spreading disinformation.

The message continued:

I checked this out on Truth or Fiction and it is true.  The bill is HR-4646 introduced by US Rep Peter deFazio D-Oregon and US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa.  It is now in committee and will probably not be brought out until after the Nov. elections.  Suggest that you pass this along and also to  your state senator and representative and US Congressman and Senators.

OK, at this point a red flag should pop up - two red flags, really.  First, I've never heard of "Truth or Fiction", so having someone anonymously claim "I checked this out on Truth or Fiction" doesn't carry any weight with me, though the site itself is something that can be investigated.  Secondly, why would "US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa" be introducing House Resolution 4646?  As Homer Simpson once said, "You call this a bicameral Congress?"

The message goes on:

One percent transaction tax is proposed President Obama's finance team

is recommending a transaction tax.  His plan is to sneak it in after the November election to keep it under the radar.  This is a 1% tax on all transactions at any financial institution.

Waitaminute.  Now this tax is being proposed by President Obama's finance team?  Are "US Rep Peter deFazio D-Oregon and US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa" on this team?    And what happened to the exemption for purchase and sale of stock?  Why does this seem to be a rephrasing of the first two paragraphs?  And what's with the wonky paragraph breaks and sentence structure, like this was sloppily edited together?

Banks, Credit Unions, etc.  Any deposit you make, or move around within your account, i.e. transfer to, will have a 1% tax charged.  If your pay check or your social Security or whatever is direct deposit, 1% tax charged.  If you hand carry a check in to deposit, 1% tax charged.  If you take cash in to deposit, 1% tax charged.  This is from the man who promised that if you make under $250,000 per year, you you will not see one penny of new tax.  Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will be amazed at what you learn.

Now this is President Obama personally proposing this bill?  This piece of legislation is very dynamic:  it has morphed several times in one photocopied page. 

Some will say aw it's just 1%...remember once the tax is there they can raise it at will.

So this goes from "informational" to "paranoid anti-Obama anti-government screed."  But is any of it true?

Well, some.  But not much.

I googled "HR 4646 snopes" to see what I got.  And what I got was this:

snopes.com: Debt Free America Act

Unfortunately, snopes.com makes its text uncopyable, so you'll have to actually click through to see what they have to say.  (And you should.)  But to summarize:

TRUE:
1.  There is a bill called HR-4646.
2.  It does function as described in the third and fourth sentences of the photocopy.  (From "There will be a 1% transaction tax..." to "...$300 on a $30,000 car purchase.")
3.  It is now in committee and will probably not be brought out until after the November elections.

FALSE:
Well, pretty much everything else.

This bill was not introduced by "US Rep Peter deFazio D-Oregon" and, in a weird show of cross-chamber cooperation,  "US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa."  It was in fact proposed by US Rep Chaka Fattah, D-Pennsylvania, representing Pennsylvania's 2nd congressional district.  According to Wikipedia, "The district includes North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, and a small part of Northeast Philadelphia and Cheltenham Township in Montgomery County." deFazio and Harkin were not even co-sponsors - which in the case of Harkin would have been technically impossible, anyway.  The bill has no co-sponsors.

This bill didn't come from President Obama's finance team, nor is it "from the man who promised that if you make under $250,000 per year, you you will not see one penny of new tax."  It was from a guy named Chaka Fattah.  What was he thinking?  I don't know.  Ask him.

The bill isn't being held up in committee until "after the November election to keep it under the radar."  It was immediately sent to committee to die.

Now, misinformation gets spread all the time.  Things get mixed up, Facts get confused.  That's not the case here.  It is very, very hard to make an honest mistake with such specificity.  What we're seeing here is a deliberate series of lies designed to slander Peter deFazio, Tom Harkin, and Barack Obama and his finance team.  Add to the lies an appeal to paranoia and fear and you have...well, a typical Republican election strategy.

And that's what this is all about.  Midterm elections are in a few weeks.  Control of the Senate and the House of Representatives are at stake.  Democrats control both the Senate and the House by slim margins.  Enough voters outraged over the information, the lies contained in this e-mail may give Republicans the edge they need to tip the balance in their favor.   How many people who read this will bother to do any research at all on this?  And how many people will assume that this is true because random forwarded e-mails and photocopies left lying around are always true?

By the way, the site "Truth or Fiction" actually does exist.  I didn't review the whole site, but what I saw did not fill me with confidence.

Here's what they had to say:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/d/debt-free-America-act.htm

Summary of the eRumor:

This is a forwarded email that says President Obama's finance team is planning to impose a 1% tax on all transactions conducted in financial institutions and that they plan to sneak it in after the November election.



The Truth:

There is a Congressional House Bill, HR-4646, the Debt Free America Act that was introduced in Congress on February 23, 2010, but we have not found any evidence that the bill is being snuck in by any finance team members as the eRumor alleges.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Congressional Representative Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania and says that it is to "establish a fee on transactions which would eliminate the national debt and replace the income tax on individuals." Fattah has a description of the bill along with a press release posted on his Congressional web site. Fattah is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, not President Obama's finance team.


The Thomas Library is the official site where legislative bills are posted and progress can be monitored. The bill can easily be found and currently the Thomas Library site shows that the Debt Free America Act is in the House committee and then will be referred to the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committees on the Budget, Rules, and Appropriations. Click here for the Thomas Library for text and status of the bill.


This is a single sponsor bill and speculators doubt its passage.


The Debt Free America Act HR-4646 can also be found at the Govtrack US site, a civic project that tracks legislative activity. Click for Govtrack.us information on HR-4646.

OK.  That matches what snopes.com had to say.  The bill has nothing to do with President Obama, nothing to do with his finance team, and is not expected to pass.  So why do I have a sense of unease when I view this site?  Well, the bottom line - or, more accurately, the top line:

A Proposed 1% Tax On All Financial Institution Transaction-Mostly Truth!

How is it possible to review this rumor, discredit its most sensational bits, and then conclude that it is "Mostly Truth?"  I don't think the "Truth or Fiction" site is necessarily that clear-headed when it comes to drawing conclusions.

Just remember the next-to-last thing this anonymous, lie-filled photocopy had to say:

Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will be amazed at what you learn.

Amen to that.  And don't believe every random e-mail or anonymous photocopy you come across.

Even more

So in addition to the new demands on my time that I wrote about a few posts back, I am also spending quite a bit of time with Homer, the cat who is recovering from surgery.  He needs to wear an "Elizabethan collar," one of those plastic funnel thingies, whenever he is unsupervised, but the E-collar makes it difficult for him to eat.  And his barrage of meds also tends to make him not want to eat.  So the home-from-work routine now is:  go directly from work to the house across town, spend some time there inspecting both sides for signs of break-ins, head over to my mom's house, put out food for all the cats but Homer, go into Homer's isolation room, remove Homer's collar, cuddle with him a bit (that's his favorite thing), set out food and coax him to eat and drink, give him his meds and replace collar after he is done eating and drinking, then feed the outdoor cats and do whatever else needs to be done.  Tomorrow morning is garbage pickup, so that meant hauling out all the garbage before bed today.   I haven't been getting to bed before 10:30 lately.

Tomorrow it's supposed to rain all day.  I'm hoping I don't have to deal with any basement or street flooding.

Somebody needs to dial back the Smudge tool a bit

I was out on a marathon shopping trip this afternoon.  First to a local vet to get a replacement for the medication for Homer that my mom dropped and spilled out last night when trying to juggle a glass vial, rubber stopper, and plastic syringe all in one hand.  This itself was a mini-marathon, since I was picking up the medicine at an Emergency Vet on a Sunday afternoon, and all sorts of actual emergencies kept coming in that took priority over my medication dispensing, so that things went to "ready an hour from two hours ago" to "ready in five minutes" to finally getting the medication an hour after I arrived.

From there I crossed the soon-to-be-demolished Eighth Avenue Bridge in Wyoming (PA) and traveled on to the Harbor Freight Tools in Wyoming.  Years ago I formed an antipathy towards Harbor Freight after several bad experiences at their Dickson City location.  At that time they only stayed open at that location until 7:00 PM, meaning that anyone working the 6:00 AM - 6:00 PM shift at the nearby factory that was one of the largest employers in the region had only a brief window of shopping opportunity considering that it took at least fifteen to twenty minutes to punch out, get to your car, navigate five miles or so of highway traffic, and get to the store - only to find shelves missing the things you were shopping for, and other-than-helpful staff who would actively avoid you until nearly closing time, when they would then inform you that the store would soon be closing.  (When I suggested to the manager that they might do more business if they stayed open a little longer, he chuckled and responded "Yeah, we hear that a lot.")  On top of that, the proportion of products sold there that are made in China is higher even than in Wal-Mart, and possibly in China itself.  Still, they had a few things there at the Wyoming location that I was specifically looking for, and the staff there is much friendlier and more helpful than the lazy, surly jerks I encountered years ago in Dickson City.

On the way out of the store at 4:27 PM I noticed that the clouds looked strange:  dark and wispy, like trails of smoke or even fake clouds:

One other thing, not so obvious here:  the sun is at the upper center left in this image, and an almost-solid array of crepuscular rays are raining down to the left of the middle light post.  I have seen this sort of thing before, but it makes you wonder if this is just an optical effect, or if there is some sort of weird physical layering of cloud layers going on.

My next stop was Sam's Club in Wilkes-Barre.  I put in more time there than I did at Harbor Freight, and I snapped this photo as I left at 5:31 PM:

After that I was off to my final stop of the afternoon before heading home:  Weis Market in downtown Nanticoke.  I snapped this photo on the way in at 5:52 PM:

...and this photo on the way out at 6:42 PM:

Note that these stripes run roughly east-west.  There was one more bit of show to be seen hours later, well after sunset.  The sky was dark and cloudy, but an eerie glow like a false Milky Way ran east-west across the sky.  I have surmised that this glow was actually these same clouds, now reflecting the upward-directed lights of the Wyoming Valley below.

If I didn't know better, I would have thought that these clouds were fake, and someone needed to take it easy with the "Smudge" tool in PhotoShop.

Not for nothing

I did a six-day stretch of work earlier this month, but because of the way it was spread out across two calendar weeks only eight hours out of the sixty seventy-two actually counted as overtime, and were subsequently paid as time-and-a-half.

This week was scheduled to be a four-day week, Sunday through Wednesday, which would have been fifty-two hours of pay for forty-eight hours of work.  I put in for two days of overtime but only got one - Friday night.  I could have put in for more, but didn't:  I had things I wanted to do on Saturday, and I had (I thought) a party to go to on Sunday.

I had a meeting that I wanted to get taken care of as soon as possible, so when it was clear I wouldn't be working on Thursday night I set it up for Thursday morning directly after work.  I won't say what it was about, but let me just say it left me feeling somewhat more secure.  I then decided to sleep the rest of the day, maybe do some things Thursday night, and then get ready to work on Friday night.

Something came up.

Homer, the most recent addition to our pride of cats, has been chronically ill since before we got him.  We rescued him as he was starving to death with his sinuses completely blocked.  He recovered most of the way, but continued to have sinus problems, ranging from a recurring snort to nasal discharge from one nostril.  Antibiotics would clear the problem up temporarily, but after a brief period it would flare back up.  Finally my mom had her vet x-ray Homer's sinuses, which revealed an obstruction on one side.  He referred us to a surgical clinic in Allentown, about an hour and a half away, where they have the specialized tools for looking into a cat's nostrils.  We figured that they would take a quick peek, spot a pine needle he inhaled back when he was an "outdoor cat," extract it, and everything would be fine.

We were wrong.

My mom scheduled an appointment for October 4, a day I was scheduled to be off.  But after a little while she decided she couldn't wait that long and rescheduled the appointment for Friday.  Yesterday.  The day I was scheduled to work overtime.

Oh, no problem.  Work started at 6:00 PM, and the appointment was for 11:30 AM.  I figured we could be there until 3:00 and I could still have plenty of time to get ready for work.  Sleep would be a problem, so I tried to pre-load my sleep on Thursday:  I slept from about 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM, then again until 6:00 PM.  I was up after that until about 1:00 AM, but forced myself back to sleep until 6:00 Friday morning.  This gave me a total of thirteen hours of sleep, enough to cover me for two days.

Homer needed surgery.

We didn't find this out right away.  It took a very long time to get there, in interminable chunks of waiting.  All this while I wasn't able to squeeze in any naps.  Homer's surgery would cost a ton of money and he would have to be held overnight.

I got home at 3:30 in the afternoon, enough time to do pretty much nothing before it was time to go to work.  I went online for a while, got my lunch and snacks together, changed my clothes, and headed out for a twelve-hour continuation to a day that began at 6:00 in the morning.

Work was remarkably uneventful.  Oh, lots of stuff happened, but none of it involved me collapsing or falling asleep.  The night actually went better than most.

I got home in time to jump into my mom's car and head with her back down to Allentown to pick up Homer.  It's the first time in a while that I've ridden in a car as a passenger, and it was an unsettling experience.  But I was able to sleep for about forty-five minutes on the way down.

Homer is back, minus one ear canal and the infection that was chewing up his sinuses and skull from the inside out.  He has a long recovery period ahead of him.

I go back to work on Monday night.  I will need to grab as much overtime as I can get.  Insurance deductible, home security system, and now this.  Expenses keep mounting.

The kicker:  the party is tonight, not Sunday.  So I could have scheduled another day of overtime on Sunday and been on my way to making eighty-eight hours of pay for seventy-two hours of work in a single calendar week.  Oh, well.  Maybe next week.

The Moon and Jupiter, September 23, 2010

The Moon is full tonight, or as near to full as to make no difference.  Most people assume that this is the best possible time to observe the Moon, but in fact it is the worst.  Because the light that we are seeing is coming directly at the surface of the Moon from behind our heads, the shadows of craters and mountains that make the Moon a wonder to behold through a telescope are absent.  Also, the extreme brightness of the full Moon creates terrible eyestrain if you view it through binoculars or a telescope.  As a bonus, scattered light from the Moon washes out surrounding stars and wrecks your night vision.  Observers dread when a full Moon (or the Moon at any phase) is in the sky during a meteor shower, as it drowns out all but the brightest meteors.

One thing the full Moon can't drown out is Jupiter, currently making its best and brightest appearance in some time.  Even in a sky full of moisture and haze and clouds, the King of the Planets shines through.  Jupiter is extra-bright right now not just because it is at its closest point to Earth in some decades, but also because it has lost (or at least misplaced) its South Equatorial Belt, one of the reddish bands of clouds that are semi-permanent features in the giant planet's atmosphere.  The belt isn't really gone, or at least not gone gone; it appears to be temporarily obscured by a layer of lighter-colored clouds.  But while it is at least temporarily absent from view, Jupiter will appear that much brighter.

If you go outside tonight and see the full Moon, take a look at the bright "star" to the south of it, and realize that this is no star at all, but rather the largest planet in our solar system!

Things to say, and no time to say them

I've got myself on a new schedule that involves face-time (so to speak) with my house across town every day.  When the break-in happened, I had been spending quite a bit of time over there - an hour or two each evening, to photograph the Venus-Mars-Saturn trio that had been visible throughout August and early September.  But that had been the first significant time that I had spent over there in quite a while.  Sometimes a week or more would go by without me even stippong to check the mail.  (I don't get much mail there.)  So as it happened I was there late on a Saturday night - not to observe, because the sky was completely overcast, but apparently to use the phone and watch TV.  After I left that night I didn't return until late Monday afternoon, which is when I discovered the break-in.  When police and the insurance adjuster asked when the break-in occurred, I wasn't able to narrow it down to much more than that.  Thank goodness the uncertainty was not greater, or some eyebrows might be raised.

But now I'm trying to make sure that answer in the future to the question "When were you last here?" will be "yesterday" or "earlier today."

Unfortunately this means I now have even less time than I used to.  So my blog reading/writing schedule is completely off.  I'll get back to writing as soon as I can.

Remind me to tell you about The Mysterious Cat.