klsiegel320 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
klsiegel320) wrote2004-02-23 08:28 am
klsiegel320) wrote2004-02-23 08:28 am
Quiet Monday
So here it is, Monday morning. Still quiet; half the team is still on the road and not yet arrived. I do have things I probably should do, but nothing that really sparks my interest, unfortunately. I seem to be running out of motivation.
That's partly tiredness. I tried last week to make a commitment to being asleep by 10, since I have to get up at 6 or so to meet the colleague with whom I'm currently carpooling. I didn't have remarkable success, although I think I did get a fraction more sleep than I might ordinarily have done. I might have gotten more yet, if I'd been smart and disabled the alarm Saturday morning...ah, well.
And of course the tiredness is pretty perpetual, because for reasons I don't entirely understand, I do not sleep well on the road. One might think I would be used to it by now; after all, I've been doing it for almost a year. One might even think things would have reversed by now, and I would sleep less well in company than alone.
Not so. At home in NJ, I sleep like a dead thing. Always. Regardless of the snores (his or mine, or even Jetsam's; yes, my cats snore).
On the road, I seem to have a terrible time getting myself to turn off whatever stupid thing I'm watching and go to bed. And then I have a terrible time getting myself to put the book down and turn off the light.
Although I confess, sometimes lately that's because I'm so engrossed in something good that I can't bear to put it down. Since we're confessing here, and since this is at least shielded behind a cut, I'll make a full confession: I've developed a certain sweet tooth for erotic romance novellas.
This is junk food, I know. I am a woman who reads Milton, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis, McCaffrey, Norton, Cherryh, O'Brian. I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Brahms. I discuss serious theology and politics and sociology.
But I also watch NASCAR races. I watch reruns of Charmed most evenings, right before the reruns of West Wing. And I read romance novellas.
I can explain, I think. Partly it's sheer loneliness; the exploits and adventures of the hero and heroine - because they are truly in love and not just screwing each other senseless - warm my heart with thoughts of my own real-life romance novel. But some of the writing is really actually very good. Genuine characterizations, fully realized settings, real risk and conflict, and usually at least a wedding or a promise of one at the end.
Much of it is dreck, granted. I find myself taking target practice on some of these, mentally copyediting to try to improve what fundamentally cannot be rescued. I find myself occasionally yawning and wishing the author owned a thesaurus; sometimes I find myself realizing that while she owns a thesaurus, she needs a dictionary to go with it, accompanied by a decent sense of the English sentence.
But there's something uplifting about a story in which a genuine good guy and a genuine good girl get together and become a genuinely good couple. And I do think it's because essentially that's what happened to me in real life: I met my husband over a fortune cookie at a campground in Pennsylvania, and we never looked back. So regardless of the description of the couple, in my mind they're always us.
Which is why I will also confess that occasionally I find myself plotting one of these in my head. Even a little on paper, during an exceptionally boring meeting. (And they think I'm taking diligent notes.) I have my setting, my hero and heroine, and some of their essential conflict. I think I have the solution to their biggest difficulty. You always have to have that; remember this is romance, which is a form of comedy: everybody winds up married at the end (as opposed to tragedy, where everybody winds up dead at the end).
I even have a related fantasy of being so good at this, and selling enough work, that it pays the bills and lets me go home. Which I guess brings us all the way back to why I'm reading trashy novellas in the first place, eh?
So what else is going on?
The routine here is about to get disrupted. One of the things they're really enforcing here is one car per two people, period. It isn't a suggestion; it is being forced on us by the project management.
Since the beginning of January, I've been sharing a ride with a colleague from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who's been staying in the same apartment complex as I am. It's an early morning, because he prefers to leave at 7:30 and stop at Starbuck's on the way to the office, and prefers to get in by 8:00.
But he isn't unreasonable, really. He would pick me up after Starbuck's if I asked (and has on occasion), and usually he's ready to leave before me in the evening, if anything. So I'm not really trapped. (Except I feel trapped because I don't have my own car and therefore I'm not free to come and go as I please, even if I know for sure that most days I wouldn't do anything different than what I'm doing now. But there you are: I'm not really trapped.)
On weekends like this just past, when we're both staying in town, I ride to the airport on Friday afternoon with another colleague, drop him off and use that car for the weekend. On weekends when the Halifaxian and I both travel, he leaves me the car on Thursday night and has a car service fetch him at whatever ungodly hour he has to be picked up to get to the airport and start his interminable travel home (which typically takes three flights and twelve hours to accomplish, on a good day). I then have the drive to myself in the morning on Friday, and in the afternoon to the airport, where I park the car and pick it up again when I come back.
This is a comfortable routine, and it works well enough. Except that the Halifaxian is leaving for good this Friday. So he's turning in the mini-leased car, and on Monday the other colleague is moving into his apartment. At which point, there really will be just one car.
The first place this pinches is that I will no longer be free even on alternate Friday mornings. The colleague with whom I will now be sharing a car goes home every weekend, but lives in Washington, so he's in the office even on the days he travels. Since he does go home every weekend, I'll still have the car on the weekends I'm not traveling, and I've been assured by the project manager that if it were to happen that we were both staying, they would cover a rental car for the weekend so that I'd have a car to myself during off-time. And he isn't quite such an early bird, so I might get just a tiny bit more sleep.
And I don't really go anywhere in the evenings during the week anyway. The most I might consider doing would be a quick grocery run; and even that most weeks can be relegated to the weekend. The one sticky place we have this week is that I need the car Wednesday to get to church for Ash Wednesday. Ideally, I'd be able to go to the 7 a.m. service, but I fear that wouldn't get me back until 8 or so, which would make Mark later than he likes. So probably I'll go to the 7 p.m. service, but that will necessitate navigating heavy traffic, and I have no idea what time I need to leave in order to be there in time...
And then I just spoke with said colleague, and he's okay with being a bit later that day; up to me, he said. So.
I'm toying with the idea of mentioning this to the one colleague I have who I know is also Episcopalian, in case he might want to go with (maybe even give me a ride so I can leave the car with Mark)...just not entirely sure. We're becoming closer friends, I think, from sheer amount of contact, but he's prickly to deal with sometimes.
At least I'm beginning to know why. He sees himself as ultra-conservative; he sees me as ultra-liberal. He is fond of calling folk of my ilk "bed-wetting liberals," and uses this term in reference to various members of his family all the time. He discovered when he called me that that the kitten has teeth; he was told firmly that he may call his family anything he likes, but he will not call me names. Ever.
And I really don't think I would describe him as ultra-conservative, unless I've totally misunderstood what that means. Because - for example - he is entirely opposed to the various movements afoot to amend state and federal constitutions in order to ban gay marriages. He's perfectly fine with homosexuals being allowed to marry; he doesn't feel it's any kind of threat to marriage at all. He opposed the war in Iraq, and found the justification flimsy and unconvincing. He agrees that everybody should have basic shelter, food, health care.
Where we differ, he contends, is this: the Democrats, he says, want to take his money and give it to somebody else, to solve the problems that person has. The Republicans want that other person to solve his or her own problems. It's about personal responsibility and accountability, he says. And dismisses out of hand the suggestion that there might be people who simply can't make it without help.
And then he revealed far more than he thought, far more I think than he intended. He said he had learned, growing up as one of seven children of a workaholic, alcoholic father, that you cannot depend on anyone in this world but yourself.
In other words, nobody ever helped me, so why should I help anybody? The deeply buried fury beneath the words was a little scarily intimate, for me; I think he was entirely unaware of it. He was simply stating his case; he had no clue that he opened for me a window into his own personal hell.
Certainly there are people who manage, somehow, to survive and even thrive in tough conditions. There are people who make it in spite of the odds. There are people who come from nothing and make something of themselves.
But there are people who can't, and there are more of those now than ever. Saying "get a job" is all well and good - except when there are no jobs, or the jobs there are don't pay enough to live on. It's fine to say "get a job outside your field, take anything that pays, take three jobs if you have to" - but when the net salary of a person making minimum wage isn't enough to pay for rent and food and health care - what then? What necessity of life do you do without?
The implication, of course, is that anyone who can't do exactly as he did, and as his father did, is somehow lazy or unwilling or not trying; that somehow that person in poverty deserves his condition, that it's all his own fault and therefore his responsibility to remedy as he can. The necessary end result of his attitude is blaming the victim.
He would no doubt say that the necessary end result of my attitude is that nobody is accountable for anything. It makes me want to argue with him, makes me want to try to teach him. Makes me want to say, "But honey, it just isn't that simple."
I mean, I'm all for personal accountability and responsibility, but within reason. If we say that every person is solely responsible for and to him- or herself, then the necessary conclusion is that if someone needs help, too bad - if they be like to die, let them die and decrease the surplus population.
I'm tempted sorely to remind him that Jesus didn't chide the five thousand for not bringing enough food with them; he simply abundantly fed them, because they were hungry. He healed the sick when they needed it, not when they could pay for it. He had compassion on those who were marginalized by their society - widows, orphans, outcasts - and made it clear that in God's eyes, no one is marginal. He said, "As I have loved you, so you should love one another." When he had washed the disciples' feet and dried them with a towel, he said, "As I have washed your feet, so you should wash one another's feet."
And really, I can't say any of that. It really just isn't my place to say any of that, except as an opening occurs. I do feel very strongly called to pray for him; some little voice says he needs it more than he could ever admit even to himself.
I'm sorely tempted to ask whether not being able to depend on anyone but himself means he can't even depend on God - but I don't need to ask, because I know the answer. As I fear abandonment - and therefore at bottom abandonment even by God - so does he fear dependency, and therefore at bottom even dependence upon God. We are more alike than he knows.
That's partly tiredness. I tried last week to make a commitment to being asleep by 10, since I have to get up at 6 or so to meet the colleague with whom I'm currently carpooling. I didn't have remarkable success, although I think I did get a fraction more sleep than I might ordinarily have done. I might have gotten more yet, if I'd been smart and disabled the alarm Saturday morning...ah, well.
And of course the tiredness is pretty perpetual, because for reasons I don't entirely understand, I do not sleep well on the road. One might think I would be used to it by now; after all, I've been doing it for almost a year. One might even think things would have reversed by now, and I would sleep less well in company than alone.
Not so. At home in NJ, I sleep like a dead thing. Always. Regardless of the snores (his or mine, or even Jetsam's; yes, my cats snore).
On the road, I seem to have a terrible time getting myself to turn off whatever stupid thing I'm watching and go to bed. And then I have a terrible time getting myself to put the book down and turn off the light.
Although I confess, sometimes lately that's because I'm so engrossed in something good that I can't bear to put it down. Since we're confessing here, and since this is at least shielded behind a cut, I'll make a full confession: I've developed a certain sweet tooth for erotic romance novellas.
This is junk food, I know. I am a woman who reads Milton, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis, McCaffrey, Norton, Cherryh, O'Brian. I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Brahms. I discuss serious theology and politics and sociology.
But I also watch NASCAR races. I watch reruns of Charmed most evenings, right before the reruns of West Wing. And I read romance novellas.
I can explain, I think. Partly it's sheer loneliness; the exploits and adventures of the hero and heroine - because they are truly in love and not just screwing each other senseless - warm my heart with thoughts of my own real-life romance novel. But some of the writing is really actually very good. Genuine characterizations, fully realized settings, real risk and conflict, and usually at least a wedding or a promise of one at the end.
Much of it is dreck, granted. I find myself taking target practice on some of these, mentally copyediting to try to improve what fundamentally cannot be rescued. I find myself occasionally yawning and wishing the author owned a thesaurus; sometimes I find myself realizing that while she owns a thesaurus, she needs a dictionary to go with it, accompanied by a decent sense of the English sentence.
But there's something uplifting about a story in which a genuine good guy and a genuine good girl get together and become a genuinely good couple. And I do think it's because essentially that's what happened to me in real life: I met my husband over a fortune cookie at a campground in Pennsylvania, and we never looked back. So regardless of the description of the couple, in my mind they're always us.
Which is why I will also confess that occasionally I find myself plotting one of these in my head. Even a little on paper, during an exceptionally boring meeting. (And they think I'm taking diligent notes.) I have my setting, my hero and heroine, and some of their essential conflict. I think I have the solution to their biggest difficulty. You always have to have that; remember this is romance, which is a form of comedy: everybody winds up married at the end (as opposed to tragedy, where everybody winds up dead at the end).
I even have a related fantasy of being so good at this, and selling enough work, that it pays the bills and lets me go home. Which I guess brings us all the way back to why I'm reading trashy novellas in the first place, eh?
So what else is going on?
The routine here is about to get disrupted. One of the things they're really enforcing here is one car per two people, period. It isn't a suggestion; it is being forced on us by the project management.
Since the beginning of January, I've been sharing a ride with a colleague from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who's been staying in the same apartment complex as I am. It's an early morning, because he prefers to leave at 7:30 and stop at Starbuck's on the way to the office, and prefers to get in by 8:00.
But he isn't unreasonable, really. He would pick me up after Starbuck's if I asked (and has on occasion), and usually he's ready to leave before me in the evening, if anything. So I'm not really trapped. (Except I feel trapped because I don't have my own car and therefore I'm not free to come and go as I please, even if I know for sure that most days I wouldn't do anything different than what I'm doing now. But there you are: I'm not really trapped.)
On weekends like this just past, when we're both staying in town, I ride to the airport on Friday afternoon with another colleague, drop him off and use that car for the weekend. On weekends when the Halifaxian and I both travel, he leaves me the car on Thursday night and has a car service fetch him at whatever ungodly hour he has to be picked up to get to the airport and start his interminable travel home (which typically takes three flights and twelve hours to accomplish, on a good day). I then have the drive to myself in the morning on Friday, and in the afternoon to the airport, where I park the car and pick it up again when I come back.
This is a comfortable routine, and it works well enough. Except that the Halifaxian is leaving for good this Friday. So he's turning in the mini-leased car, and on Monday the other colleague is moving into his apartment. At which point, there really will be just one car.
The first place this pinches is that I will no longer be free even on alternate Friday mornings. The colleague with whom I will now be sharing a car goes home every weekend, but lives in Washington, so he's in the office even on the days he travels. Since he does go home every weekend, I'll still have the car on the weekends I'm not traveling, and I've been assured by the project manager that if it were to happen that we were both staying, they would cover a rental car for the weekend so that I'd have a car to myself during off-time. And he isn't quite such an early bird, so I might get just a tiny bit more sleep.
And I don't really go anywhere in the evenings during the week anyway. The most I might consider doing would be a quick grocery run; and even that most weeks can be relegated to the weekend. The one sticky place we have this week is that I need the car Wednesday to get to church for Ash Wednesday. Ideally, I'd be able to go to the 7 a.m. service, but I fear that wouldn't get me back until 8 or so, which would make Mark later than he likes. So probably I'll go to the 7 p.m. service, but that will necessitate navigating heavy traffic, and I have no idea what time I need to leave in order to be there in time...
And then I just spoke with said colleague, and he's okay with being a bit later that day; up to me, he said. So.
I'm toying with the idea of mentioning this to the one colleague I have who I know is also Episcopalian, in case he might want to go with (maybe even give me a ride so I can leave the car with Mark)...just not entirely sure. We're becoming closer friends, I think, from sheer amount of contact, but he's prickly to deal with sometimes.
At least I'm beginning to know why. He sees himself as ultra-conservative; he sees me as ultra-liberal. He is fond of calling folk of my ilk "bed-wetting liberals," and uses this term in reference to various members of his family all the time. He discovered when he called me that that the kitten has teeth; he was told firmly that he may call his family anything he likes, but he will not call me names. Ever.
And I really don't think I would describe him as ultra-conservative, unless I've totally misunderstood what that means. Because - for example - he is entirely opposed to the various movements afoot to amend state and federal constitutions in order to ban gay marriages. He's perfectly fine with homosexuals being allowed to marry; he doesn't feel it's any kind of threat to marriage at all. He opposed the war in Iraq, and found the justification flimsy and unconvincing. He agrees that everybody should have basic shelter, food, health care.
Where we differ, he contends, is this: the Democrats, he says, want to take his money and give it to somebody else, to solve the problems that person has. The Republicans want that other person to solve his or her own problems. It's about personal responsibility and accountability, he says. And dismisses out of hand the suggestion that there might be people who simply can't make it without help.
And then he revealed far more than he thought, far more I think than he intended. He said he had learned, growing up as one of seven children of a workaholic, alcoholic father, that you cannot depend on anyone in this world but yourself.
In other words, nobody ever helped me, so why should I help anybody? The deeply buried fury beneath the words was a little scarily intimate, for me; I think he was entirely unaware of it. He was simply stating his case; he had no clue that he opened for me a window into his own personal hell.
Certainly there are people who manage, somehow, to survive and even thrive in tough conditions. There are people who make it in spite of the odds. There are people who come from nothing and make something of themselves.
But there are people who can't, and there are more of those now than ever. Saying "get a job" is all well and good - except when there are no jobs, or the jobs there are don't pay enough to live on. It's fine to say "get a job outside your field, take anything that pays, take three jobs if you have to" - but when the net salary of a person making minimum wage isn't enough to pay for rent and food and health care - what then? What necessity of life do you do without?
The implication, of course, is that anyone who can't do exactly as he did, and as his father did, is somehow lazy or unwilling or not trying; that somehow that person in poverty deserves his condition, that it's all his own fault and therefore his responsibility to remedy as he can. The necessary end result of his attitude is blaming the victim.
He would no doubt say that the necessary end result of my attitude is that nobody is accountable for anything. It makes me want to argue with him, makes me want to try to teach him. Makes me want to say, "But honey, it just isn't that simple."
I mean, I'm all for personal accountability and responsibility, but within reason. If we say that every person is solely responsible for and to him- or herself, then the necessary conclusion is that if someone needs help, too bad - if they be like to die, let them die and decrease the surplus population.
I'm tempted sorely to remind him that Jesus didn't chide the five thousand for not bringing enough food with them; he simply abundantly fed them, because they were hungry. He healed the sick when they needed it, not when they could pay for it. He had compassion on those who were marginalized by their society - widows, orphans, outcasts - and made it clear that in God's eyes, no one is marginal. He said, "As I have loved you, so you should love one another." When he had washed the disciples' feet and dried them with a towel, he said, "As I have washed your feet, so you should wash one another's feet."
And really, I can't say any of that. It really just isn't my place to say any of that, except as an opening occurs. I do feel very strongly called to pray for him; some little voice says he needs it more than he could ever admit even to himself.
I'm sorely tempted to ask whether not being able to depend on anyone but himself means he can't even depend on God - but I don't need to ask, because I know the answer. As I fear abandonment - and therefore at bottom abandonment even by God - so does he fear dependency, and therefore at bottom even dependence upon God. We are more alike than he knows.
no subject
Why are you, a woman, being forced to depend on the good nature of your male colleagues? Why can't you be with the one with the keys to the vehicle and be the driving person? Why is it all predicated on what they are doing, and you expected to be passive about it all?
Okay, so that was three questions!
And my last is: Doesn't the company recognize the liability potential should one of you decide to be less than an adult?
Re: The Three Questions
And really it's predicated on what we all need to do. I don't think I am expected to be passive, I think I'm expected to make my needs known - and I do.
This week is an example: All Saints has a 7 a.m. and a 7 p.m. service on Wednesday. Honest truth: I'd rather go to the a.m., but realizing that this would mean we wouldn't get to the office until 8:30 or after, I asked if that would be a problem (and it wasn't going to be). I was contemplating various possible solutions - including going to the 7 p.m. instead, which would not be the end of the world. The only solution I did not entertain was not making it to church for Ash Wednesday.
So we discussed it; he didn't really feel it would be so late as to be a problem, and was fine with sleeping in a little (he likes to sleep, a lot; I worry for him with a baby on the way). And then it turns out that somebody else offered to go fetch him that morning so that he doesn't have to wait for me to get back - so nobody's really inconvenienced, and everybody gets where they need to be at the time they need to get there.
In some ways, having to accommodate somebody else's schedule - particularly somebody as punctual as this guy - is good for me. We're theoretically expected by the client to be here by 8 (although really the place doesn't seem to be fully alive until about 9), and yet if I were entirely on my own, I know my arrival time would creep later. I'm an artificial morning person, on the best of days, and I don't fake it well.
It's also good to have to distinguish between what one wants to do and what one needs to do. There hasn't been a time since I've been here that I haven't been able to do what I needed to do - run an errand, get to the Post Office, get groceries, fetch Don from the airport, whatever.
Do I miss being able to leave when I'm damn good and ready instead of having to meet a schedule? Do I miss playing CDs in the car and singing along? Do I miss just knowing I could hop in the car if I chose, even if I know I wouldn't choose to? Sure. I do indeed miss those things.
But I also recognize that I've gotten very spoiled. One of the ways this country's and this world's environment will improve is if more people choose to share, to somewhat limit their freedom for the common good. Granted that this choice is being forced on us by project management to boost the company's profit margin; it's still a sound environmental choice.
The short answer is: I don't really feel abused, and the degree to which it pinches is - I think - more a measure of how absolutely spoiled I am by having had the ability to come and go whenever I pleased, for so long. I'm only passive as long as I choose to be, and I'm perfectly capable of stating what my needs are when I have them. And I think the mental and spiritual exercise of distinguishing needs from wants is a lovely discipline for Lent...
Checking in. . . .
The phenomenon you describe -- sleeping poorly on the road and like a log at home -- sounds like me when K. is working at night or on the rare occasions when he is away overnight. Somehow I'm not there in bed alone until that light goes out, or the TV goes off. I either read or watch TV until I'm exhausted and bleary-eyed. . . I cannot sympathize enough with how hard it must be to be away from your own bed for so long.
I'm sorry that the car situation is about to get less flexible. Sounds like you are making the best of it and even viewing it as a discipline.
[I won't write here about what's been up with me: There're some general baseball, book, and movie posts at the main blog (http://bookworm.typepad.com) and a new post on the baby blog (http://bookworm.typepad.com/babymakesthree). And I'll try to give you a call soon -- seems like eons since we've chatted.]
Re: Checking in. . . .
The sleeping phenomenon has got to improve; I'm staggering around exhausted most of the time, which besides not being conducive to providing the best work, is not fun at all. I'm really glad today is pretty light...got about four hours because I had a 6:00 flight from Newark to Cincinnati to pick up my connection to Jacksonville (never again, never again, never again - in spite of the fact that it all went reasonably well and I got here exactly the time I'd expected to and the Cincinnati airport is actually quite nice (at least the part I saw)).
And I am making the best of it, and viewing it as a discipline, but I'm also beginning to feel a bit abused. For example - the guy who's just moving into the apartment vacated by the Halifaxian goes home every weekend - and will continue to go home every weekend, despite being in a corporate apartment. Whereas I am expected to go home at most every other weekend...this just doesn't strike me as fair.
And of course, I want to be cautious about raising the point, because I don't want to elicit what my husband refers to as the "Boikes" response: I don't want them to say, "You know, you're right" and then tell him he can't go home every weekend. After all, he's got a five-year-old at home. (A cute five-year-old who apparently has daddy wrapped securely around her little finger...but that's a story for another time.)
Now, you of all people know that I'm not one to be stingy or to stand on ceremony. I bend over backwards to accommodate when other people think I'm crazy (like booking a connecting flight that makes my six-and-a-half-hour commute home into an eight-hour commute (that's door-to-door, office to home)). But I don't feel anybody ought to be getting preferential treatment here.
If the price of being in the corporate apartment is staying over weekends, then that rule should apply to everybody staying in a corporate apartment. Now, somebody tells me the rule is based on total cost, not strictly on "every other weekend."
So - for example - although he goes home every weekend, he comes back on Sunday night most weeks. So I guess if you count up the cost of however many nights in a month he'd stay at the hotel - figuring returns on Sunday nights - and compare it to the cost per day of the apartment, as long as the apartment works out cheaper than the hotel, he can go home every week.
Personally - I find it hard to believe that it works out cheaper, considering that the apartment rent is 1,915.35 a month. At any rate, I plan to raise the matter - delicately - with the project manager, and request that either I be given leave to travel as often as I feel like it (not necessarily every weekend, but not to be limited to only two weekends a month by rule), or take four-day weekends when I go home; something like that.
And I suppose that's enough of this for now...
Re: Re: checking in
Re: feeling abused -- I agree with you, that it is unfair on its face for one person to get to go home every weekend and another to be expected to go only every other weekend. I think having a reasonable discussion with the project manager is a good idea.
Did you watch the Oscars? And what do you think of all the Yankees drama????? Heck, I thought I'd have a phone message from you Valentine's weekend when we got home. ;-) (Yes, I know the phone lines work in both directions!)
Re: Re: checking in
Other than that - that's an extra hour and a half I could have been at home with Don and the cats on Friday night; if I'd been on the 5:10 direct from Jax, assuming it was on time, I'd've been home from the airport by 8:30 or 9, instead of midnight...okay, three hours I could have been at home with Don and the cats.
And potentially that's a little more sleep I could have gotten Monday a.m., although all the directs in the morning that would get me here at a reasonable hour are early-early, which isn't my favorite time of day to do anything other than sleep...well, or...let's leave it at sleep.
Why the change? Because when I tried booking the regular direct flights, I was getting ticket prices of $50-100 more than I was offered for connectors. I don't know why - and I'm not going to be suckered again. The travel rules say "lowest logical fare," and define logical as no more than one stop each way, total trip time isn't increased by more than two hours, arrival/departure window must be within two hours either side of your requested time, and savings must be at least $300 per trip to offset inconvenience. Ah. And I see where I made my mistake; the savings were not sufficient to offset the inconvenience (at least, for me). Sigh...
Actually, there might possibly be reasons to do it again (now that I've sworn never to do it again). The flights were all on larger planes (smallest I saw was an MD-88), and coming back Monday morning they were nearly empty (lots of elbow room). And the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati airport is very ritzy (assuming one had room in the bag and a long enough layover to go shopping). So there were compensations.
Re: Oscars: some. Fell asleep just before they announced LOTR for best picture, although we could pretty much see the handwriting on the wall.
Re: Yankees drama: I've, er, actually been woefully poorly informed. What Yankees drama? (Do I really want to know?)
Re: Re: Re: checking in
Yes, it definitely seemed obvious that LOTR would win, as they swept award after award all evening long.
Yankees drama: The biggest news is that A-Rod is now our third baseman, having been traded to the Yankees by Texas in exchange for Soriano and a player to be named later. He agreed to switch to 3B from SS. [Aaron Boone, who was our third baseman, played a game of pick-up basketball in January and blew out his ACL. He likely wouldn't have been able to play at all this season. The Yankees cut him (the bb game was in violation of his contract) and made the A-Rod trade.]
Bernie had to have an appendectomy, which means he probably won't be playing until the first week of the season or so. This may mean that Kenny Lofton will "win" the centerfielder job in his absence, relegating Bernie to DH.
Jon Lieber, one of the pitchers projected to be a starter for us this year, is having a problem with a groin injury. Jose Contreras was scratched from a spring training game because of a lower back issue. We're sniffing around El Duque, thinking of picking him up as a possible bullpen guy and/or emergency starter.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that federal investigators named Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield as players who received steroids from Barry Bonds' personal trainer. Coincidentally or not, Giambi showed up to spring training looking substantially leaner.
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I guess I was more up on the news than I thought; I'd heard about A-Rod but somehow couldn't get too wound up for some reason...and we'd heard that Bernie had to go to the emergency room but somehow had missed hearing why. Sigh...too bad about that, but perhaps once he's feeling better he'll be able to platoon in CF, at least.
Re: El Duque: geez! We want him, we don't want him, we want him...somebody finish picking the petals off the daisy already!
Also hadn't heard that Giambi and Sheffield were named by investigators; I'd heard that they were on the list of very strong players who were "under suspicion" but didn't realize the suspicion was official. That would be really bad - for the game and for the Yankees...sigh...
Baseball
Re: Bernie -- True, since he's a switch hitter that should make him more flexible as far as getting in the lineup. I'm not sure how much longer his contract runs. . . his performance has been diminished with shoulder problems, knee problems. Hard to think of someone my age as starting to near retirement.
Re: Duque -- laughing in agreement at your comment.
Re: Giambi & Sheffield -- I wonder what would happen if someone could prove they had taken steroids. . . aside from the PR tsunami. Fines, suspensions?
Re: Baseball
Re: Baseball
From the New York Times:
"If a player tests positive for the first time, he is not immediately disciplined. He is placed in a treatment program; if he does not comply with it, he is subject to a series of fines and suspensions, depending on the number of times he does not comply. The schedule starts with a 15- to 25-day suspension without pay or a maximum fine of $10,000. A fourth failure to comply with the treatment program produces a minimum one-year suspension or a maximum $100,000 fine. If a player tests positive a second time or subsequent times, he incurs a suspension or fine, ranging from 15 days or a maximum of $10,000 for the second time to one year or a maximum of $100,000 for the fifth positive test result. A player who is convicted of steroid use in a legal proceeding faces a 15- to 30-day suspension or a maximum $10,000 fine for the first time, to a two-year suspension for a fourth offense. If a player is convicted of selling or distributing steroids, he faces a 60- to 90-day suspension and a maximum $100,000 fine and a two-year suspension for a second offense. In each category, the agreement gives the commissioner the right to impose more severe discipline for subsequent offenses beyond those listed. . . If any member of the joint labor-management health advisory committee has reason to believe that in the previous year a player has used, possessed, sold or distributed a prohibited substance, he can request a committee meeting. If the committee thinks that reasonable cause exists, the player will be subject to immediate testing. The committee could presumably act in the cases of the players who have been widely mentioned as suspected steroid users, like those who testified before the grand jury. But it's unlikely that the committee would act precipitously unless trial testimony elicited more concrete information."
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