/life/Potatos Salad, Haystacks, Banana Bread and Nothing
Today's a comp day for a weekend oncall. It was a quiet weekend, so I got lots of cooking -- my first attempt at potato salad in a long time, and some old standbys. I also cooked dinner for Trev and Krista and Clare -- pretty good burritos, though I didn't quite make enough food. We watched Raging Bull, which was before my usual (tongue-in-cheek but substantially true in practice) 1991 cutoff for movies I'll watch. I spent much of the time cooking listening to an audiobook of Plato's republic. The argumentation is fascinating -- hardly rigourous but the sense that there's adversariality in the dialectic makes you accept it as though it is indeed rigourous. The other fascinating thing is how much stuff that I assumed to be post-Enlightment philosophical developments -- like specialized labour, and some models of justice -- were actually Platonic.
Today I slept in and, given the rainy weather, spent some time reading my Nana's "Nothing Book". My mum and her siblings gave it to their mum in 1980 as a place to record thoughts and things, like a diary but it's certainly written in a style expecting people to read it -- it's a sort of primitive blog, written on thinly sliced dead trees. She speaks of old cash registers, her first microwave, and family events and some of the troubles of old age with a positive outlook on everything. I'm up to 1991 right now, where she writes this about the impending Gulf War on January 11th:
I thought how different was the situation as far as the dissemination of news of events leading to the two previous World Wars in my lifetime. I was too young to remember the time prior to the outbreak of the 1914 war but I well remember the War years. Of course, the Gov't always needed money and they borrowed it from people in War Bonds. Those who had little were encouraged to buy War Saving stamps at 25 cents and when you had $4.00 in stamps in your little book it was an achievement because in 5 years time that would be worth $5.00...In 1939 war we were kept informed in more detail but it was the milkman at 7:00am who told me of the attack on Poland and the outbreak of war.
The perception of the situation as being an impending World War is interesting, and forgotten at least from my mind. Her writing is clear, simple, and proper, yet full of warmth and detail about the little things that made her happy -- salmon sandwiches, birds in spring, the vigour of clearing sidewalks, stars in the early morning.
What else? Lot's of other things -- had a great trip to Canada, visiting family and friends, and working from the Waterloo office -- hurray multinationalism. I'm all into Facebook now, and so's most of my high school class and lots of my University friends.
I've been down and out from running on account of over-stressing my hip joints -- I believe it's trochanteric bursitis, the inflamation of one of the little sacs of fluid that help everything move smoothly. I took a two-week break after things got somewhat painful from carring around my bags in Toronto. Then last week I got sick and taken out from work. So it's been three weeks, and this morning it was pissing rain then hailing, but it's cleared now; I think I'll do a 2km run. If that goes badly, I'll have to bite the bullet and go to a physiotherapist.
I've cut way back on drinking all of a sudden; on Thursday, since I was still recovering, I performed the herculean task of really actually having "just the one." I proceeded to have one of the more fun evenings I've had with coworkers in a while -- it was a really great group of people and I had been a shut-in for two days. But the whole moderation thing reminded me of how reasonable that seemed in Finland -- two pints, no more.
Ireland just had an election. They have the most complicated national voting system I know of -- single transferable vote (like instant runoff voting but not quite) with multi-person (two to five) constituencies. In general it produces a highly proportionate lower house while still having parochial representation. It also makes for an incredibly boring election, as they announce a single winner, transfer and count leftover votes, and announce another, etc. There are 166 seats (minus the speaker); the split amongst the parties was 78/51/20/2/6/4 and 5 independents, with the 51 (Fine Gael) and the 20 (Labour) highly unlikely to join the dominant party (Fianna Fáil), so interesting negotiation ensues. Anyway, I finally understand the Irish political landscape reasonably well, which is nice.
I've reached practical completion (can you tell I have architects and builders in my life?) of my economics course. It's been interesting course, filling out certain things I understood poorly like elasticity, and adding whole new models of behaviour, like monopoly pricing. There was a lot of bullshit, and so much absurd simplification, but so it goes. Reading a textbook wasn't as painful as I'd expected, and I didn't use much of the other course infrastructure, so it wasn't worth my 800CAD except to get a formal credit. I still have to write the two exams, but other than that things are in order. The amount of time that this seems to have suddenly freed up for Plato and my grandmother's writing is incredible, especially in concert with an oncall weekend that I would recently have spent procrastinating a lot and studying a little.
That's about it. And I just missed the window of sunshine to enjoy a quick jog in -- oh well, back to the Nothing Book.
Comments
Tony wrote
Practical Completion sounds a lot like a "release candidate" ;-)
Jim wrote
I remember clearly, at the start of the second gulf war (the current one, if i'm counting properly), listening to the announcement on the radio of the first official bomb strikes, as they happened, on the radio. There's so much information about current conflicts that it just becomes background noise, and my ability to tell major from minor events, or to discern bullshit and missing information, is basically nullilfied. I do remember a very powerful fear that this would escalate into a major worldwide conflict - but then, every time i hear about airplanes dropping bombs I flash on nuclear annihilation, so there's that.
Practical Completion sounds like "Giving Up" - but that's my unique damage, now, isn't it? :)
Rob wrote
I can't believe there's still two people who check my blog (possibly automatically) often enough to notice a post within a day. hah.
PC is a lot like RC for MS. :-)
Also, I remember in the late nineties during one of the scarier near-escalations thinking it was all going to asplode.
Oh well, we're safe now.
Jim wrote
> Oh well, we're safe now.
Yup, now that the ter'ists have the gubments occupied.
Krista wrote
There was enough food! We all got fat and sassy.
