| Lean Green Linux Machine | | | | Anyone else doing this? I have been watching the development of these adorable lappies for awhile, and this would be a rare chance to get one for my own use, not to mention give one to a child in a developing country.
It would be my first Linux machine. Check it out! |
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| | | Lazy Bums | | | | This started out as a comment to Ned here, but turned into a ramble - which I then lost - so this is a boiled-down twice repeat, not as fresh as the first time, but I didn't want to give up.
My understanding of what happened at the end of WWII is rather sketchy. (I was born in 1958.) But I do remember learning about the GI Bill. In order to prevent what happened at the end of WWI, with returning vets flooding the labor market in the Great Depression, FDR passed the GI Bill, which provided funds for returning vets to go on the dole for a year, to receive loans for purchasing a home or starting a business, or to further their educations at colleges or vocational schools.
The expectation was that most of the vets would go onto unemployment for awhile and then return to their former livelihoods. However, the overwhelming majority of veterans took advantage of the educational opportunity. Of course, many took advantage of the home and business loans as well. After WWII, not only did the US economy remain stable, it boomed.
Was the boom due to the redistribution of great amounts of money (collected as taxes by the government and disbursed through the choices made by all those vets) throughout the economy?
Or was the boom due to the hard work of the returning vets increasing their skills and their expectations of themselves?
Surely the labor market was stabler than the previous time around. During the late 40's and 1950's a forgotten factor also helped balance the labor market: women and minorities were increasingly sidelined back into the kitchen and into lower paying jobs. Just as memories of the Great Depression informed the creation of the GI Bill, didn't memories of wartime self-sufficiency and post-war educational promise inform the feminist and civil rights movements of the 1960's?
By the late 1960's came a backlash against all that working and striving, as a postwar generation that had never known hardship came of age. This was a time of blossoming of rich, positive values: peace, love, understanding, self-exploration, love of the land, spiritual quests, a sense of "life as adventure." When carried to excess, however, these values sometimes soured into narcissism, hedonism, and indifference.
I think for all the great good they have done, unions also played their part in eroding the American work ethic. Though I'm not yet anti-union, it seems that their gains in one generation often led to complacency in the next.
Finally, my remarks about the GI bill notwithstanding, I have a very conflicting feelings about the government throwing great sums of money at social issues. For all the positive results, there also seems to come an "entitlement mentality" that keeps people thinking small. "I want my fair share of these particular breadcrumbs" instead of "Here is my vision for my life. How am I going to achieve it?"
I've been rambling here, sharing my limited views of factors affecting the American work ethic in an effort to stimulate some responses. Do you find my sense of what happened totally off the mark, or only slightly skewed? In what sense? Of course I'm being somewhat simplistic but what did happen to the work ethic? Anything? What about this so-called entitlement mentality? Are there some things to which we all should feel entitled? be entitled?
If you're not from the US, what is the work ethic like where you live, and how about its interplay with government run programs? |
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| | | Sunday Drive | | | | Sunday we headed toward the Connecticut River for some eagle watching. We did not see another eagle, but we did see lots of other good stuff along the way:
Hammonasset
a heron pair landing in the saltmarsh
a gull dropping shellfish to break them open on the rocks below
little fish that looked like big fish to the teeny tiny small fry
sunshine
horses and buggies
retrievers retrieving
miniature deltas
Chester
inland wetlands
ferry
Goodspeed
helicopter lessons
cormorant
Gillette Castle
highways and byways
Devil's Hopyard
reflections
Our favorite old house
We picked up:
a wet flare (returned)
pink sand (returned)
seeds for the seed vault (kept)
a lost hiker (returned) |
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| | | Even Eagles Have a Bad Day Sometimes | | | | Last week we took a walk along the shore of Black Pond in Meriden.  (photo cribbed with a big thank you from buddhamouse.) We have yet to hike along the ridge, but are finding inspiration reading buddhamouse's hiking adventures.
Next stop was my friend Wayne’s for some apple picking - the great millstone-shaped Cortlands make wonderful pies. (Dd makes wonderful pies!) High Hill Orchard sits up on a nearby glacial drumlin almost as high as the rocky ridges - the difference being that the drumlin is made of rich soils scraped up and deposited in a huge egg-shaped mound by the glacier.
On the way home, we stopped for a moment to check out North Farms Reservoir, then back down Route 68 when I noticed a large bird flying straight along the road, back in the direction we’d come from. That couldn’t be a hawk with such a bright white head and tail feathers. Wow! An eagle! We turned back to get another look.
By now an amazing aerial battle was taking place high above. Two hawks were harassing the eagle, trying to drive it off. A hawk would swoop in and ram the eagle from above and to the side, but would never dare to get in front of the eagle. Meanwhile the other hawk would swoop back up to make its next attack.
At each attack, the eagle would dip a little and readjust with hardly a flap of the wings. The hawks kept trying to fly higher and higher to keep up with the eagle who continued to soar effortlessly, beautifully. The eagle seemed completely unafraid of the hawks, which seemed downright puny in comparison. By the last time a hawk attacked, the eagle had positioned his talons well. We saw the hawk get twisted around in midair. He was lucky to be able to fly off. At this point the hawks gave up.
The eagle flew high in the air now, a tiny speck, high over the chain of ponds below, over ridges and in the direction of the Connecticut River. I know the high bluffs along the River where eagles overwinter, feasting on fish. We’re sure that’s where this one was headed. |
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| | | Dentona's not Dentona anymore | | | | The woman who created dentona2000 has outgrown her former self/skin/mold, so she burned down dentona's house. She may be back with some new blogs,
"Oh, and I'm still very happy. Everything is going swimmingly.
Tell everyone hello."
Blogladder friends can still reach her via email. PM me for the address. |
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| | | | | | | Whew! | | | | | It took awhile but I finally figured out how to start a new entry. Heehee, like going on a blog egger hunt ladder thingee for fun. |
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| | | Rules of THUMB | | | | At the block party the other night, someone asked about "rules of engagement." Now, I don't really think rules of engagement are necessary here, but coming up with a few "rules of thumb" might make our interactions a little easier. For example:
If a blogger posts in a non-personal way about some controversial topic, it seems appropriate to debate the topic in comments.
If a blogger posts about a personal belief or experience that has a controversial aspect to it, it isn't necessarily wise to debate that aspect in comments. Sometimes a person is just recording where they're at in a given point of time. (An exception would be when the blogger specifically invites a debate.)
If you have something to say directly to a blogger about their post, it makes sense to put it in a comment.
Comments shouldn't necessarily be kept short, but often a person's blog jump-starts our own involved thinking about a topic, and we should consider whether our response is really a comment to the blogger, or should become a post on our own blog.
Nobody's perfect. Threads get hijacked all the time. Sometimes no one minds; sometimes feelings get hurt. We do pretty well when we just use common sense.
Peace out. |
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| | | The Week in Review | | | | When I started here at blogladder, there wasn't much happening in my life. I was in a transitional period - ok, everything's always in flux, we're all in a transitional period, right now, all the time...stuff of life an' all that - lets call it a fallow period.
The farmers are paid to leave their cornfields standing fallow.
To my child's mind that was the weirdest, strangest, most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard.
Two periods of official unemployment flanked a couple of unreliable part-time jobs.
When there's plenty of crop to meet the demand, the price starts to go down. To keep the prices high enough, the government pays the farmers to not grow their crops.
Oh.
I was healing from the burnout of many years of organizing work. I didn't get out much any more. My man and I had left each other. I'd purchased a fixer-upper house, moved in, and done as much fixing-upping as one woman could with my limited financial resources and choppy time resources. I didn't know where to. I wanted to draw on my creative energies; I sat at home and dreamed. Maybe I'd return to my first love, and start writing again.
The soybeans part made only slightly more sense.
You see, the corn takes up a lot of nitrogen from the soil when it grows. After a few years, even with fertilizing, the corn has depleted the nitrogen in the soil. Then we plant soybeans. They fix the nitrogen in the soil.
Fix.
Some years ago I finally learned enough about soil science to understand how soybeans work their magic. Unfortunately, when I bought this house it came without enough yard for a garden. Not that I'm complaining (the walls have ears); I get to watch all the fascinating life of my little brook that stands in for a yard.
Our garden corn is ripening on the stalks. My life is busy now. I have a good steady job that affords plenty of creative outlets. I'm valued there. I have a new man, a good one. We share plenty of gardens. The plans for the next stages of house-fixing are beginning to firm up. My horseshoe game is improving.
My horseshoe game - that's something that started during the 'fallow period.'
I intended to post about how I'd been through an empty stretch and how now my life is so full and rich and busy that I barely even have time to drop in here. But as wrote, I kept recalling things from that 'empty period.' Up sprang wonderful things that I'd habitually weeded from my thoughts even as I cut them out of this entry. Songs and songwriters who had slipped back into my life during those years. Being recruited to work on a public art project, and all the time spent at the studio. The heady days of developing a plan and a team to restore a magnificent historic building. Being recruited to develop a screenplay, and running around in New York and London. Both part-time jobs contained whole worlds in themselves: the law office, the orchard. If any of the work had been steadier, I could have remained, fascinated, for years. If any of my creative partners had been stabler, our projects might have continued. The bottom line was, and always has been money. I need to change my mindset.
You can't! We're poor!
Well, we weren't poor, we were just young and anxious and taking it out on the kids.
I used to play in the cornfields, running through tall corridors of corn. I examined the soybeans and wandered in the fallow fields where alfalfa and clover grew sweet and mullein stalks shot up high over their velvety leaves.
You can do anything you want. Don't worry about the money, it will be there when you get there.
Mixed messages.
Last night I just finished reading a Sydney Sheldon novel about a woman developer. It was cartoon-like compared to some of the really great writing I appreciate, but it was still fun. I started thinking how it wouldn't be so bad to relax my standards just enough to go for it, and just get something written. Then I noticed the blurb about Sydney Sheldon on the book jacket. He'd written the screenplay for Annie get Your Gun and was the creator of I Dream of Jeannie, a couple of childhood favorites. He was extremely prolific and had been a writer of some sort his entire career.
I'm fascinated by people who know what they want and pursue it to the end. I admire people who at an early age know who they are, what they want. I'm fortunate to have any number of such people in my life. But I'm surely not one of them.
Some part of me is still very, very unformed. |
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