6-18 through 6-20, Monday through Wednesday

On Monday we came up to the mountains to do some painting and get our new refrigerator (the old one must be 20 years old).  An uneventful trip, I’m happy to say.  Had a nice meal at Sorrento’s when we got up to the mountains but otherwise have spent each day painting. By Wednesday afternoon we had finished the walls and Thursday we’ll touch up the trim paint.  The refrigerator comes on Friday. Tuesday was warm and humid (highs around 81) but Wednesday was glorious, with temps around 68.  Lovely.

6-16 & 6-17, Saturday & Sunday

This weekend has been an average weekend. A combination of errands (copying programs for Marian’s professional association), entertainment (going to the movies, heading over to a nice bar/restaurant for a drink and a snack), and preparing for our trip to the mountains (cleaning up, throwing away piles of newspapers and magazines/journals we have finished reading).

Summery weather but still below average temps. Lows in the mornings have been in the mid-60s which lowers average temps.

The New York Times ran a story on Mitt Romney as a presidential commodity on Saturday. The piece paints Romney as an automaton candidate, always perfect, always on topic, but unable to connect with people. The article describes a father of a solider saying to Romney that his son was about to go to Iraq and what was Romney going to do to fix the mess over there. Romney offers the obligatory acknowledgment of family sacrifice and then launched into an 8-minute lecture on Iraq. The article notes his preparation but his totally inadequate response on a human level. This sounds familiar, of course, to those watching the 2004 Prez campaign where John Kerry mastered the details but simply could not communicate with people on a human level.

Human Slavery

Speaking of human levels, the Wall Street Journal had a story on human slavery within China. Citizens kidnapped and shipped to brick kilns where they worked for 17 hours a day for nothing. I first ran across modern human slavery when I was researching the impact of globalization for a course I was teaching at the local state university. The existence of involuntary servitude in the 21st century was a revelation to me. Looking through State Department and UN reports I discovered that every country is complicit in this trade of nearly 1 million people each year. While our prejudice may lead us to expect this sort of activity to occur in a developing country, it is prevalent in places such as Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, the United States. How could such things happen here, or in countries with overt religious characters such as Israel or Turkey?

Stunning.

Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient

On an entirely different level of involuntary work, Simone Weil worked several factory jobs in the 30s to experience the lives of the working class. Weil was born into a middle-class French family and taught in a public school during her short life (she died at the age of 34). But she was a radical leftist who wanted to live her principles. She fought in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists in 1937 and was a French Resistance fighter early in WWII. Her place in history is gained through her philosophical writings where meaning is equated with action in the world. She certainly practiced what she preached.

Her official cause of death was tuberculosis but she appears to really have died from complications of anorexia nervosa.

This poem evokes her year working as a laborer, which she remembers as, “That contact with affliction had killed my youth”.

Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)

A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.

She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:

The irreducible slavery of workers. “To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work.”

She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,

In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples

Ten hours per day. She doesn’t eat.
She doesn’t sleep. She almost doesn’t think

Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now

That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave’s.

Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled

Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins from the flames.

Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted

Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.

Proposition: “Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.

Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed.”

We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit

To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,

To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.

She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .

Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.

Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.

Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.

————Edward Hirsch, “Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)” from Earthly Measures

6-15, Friday

Dreamweaver 8 Advanced

The local community college offers software courses so I took the second class they have for Dreamweaver 8

Learned all about css, java scripts, templates, xhtml. Now I need to practice.

Wall Street Journal

Their article on the surge in foreclosures reports that

Seasonally adjusted, 0.58% of loans entered the foreclosure process last quarter, compared with 0.54% in the fourth quarter of 2006 and 0.41% in last year’s first quarter. The rates for the past two quarters are the highest in the survey’s 37-year history. The MBA reported that the spike in foreclosures was much steeper in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada than in other areas. Mr. Duncan said some speculators are walking away from properties in the face of falling prices and higher borrowing costs.

Leading to the conclusion that

The trade group’s chief economist, Doug Duncan, predicted that delinquencies would likely rise, peaking later in the year. He also said rising foreclosures probably wouldn’t peak until next year. “Our view is that we will probably see modest increases in delinquencies and foreclosures for the next couple of quarters,” Mr. Duncan said.

WSJ has done a good job of following this failure of the market to regulate itself. The market is not always rational and often not efficient. Those selling and underwriting these marginal loans were rewarded for their irresponsible behavior. Newspapers were no better in warning citizens, instead breathlessly reporting enormous increases in real estate prices, further stoking the real estate boom.

Book I finished

I just finished When the Press Fails:Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. I talk about it in the book section.

6-14, Thursday

We’ve gotten more than an inch of rain this week.  Almost 6 inches this month so far but we are still more than 5 inches below our annual average.

The Vet

A feared day around here — annual checkups and rabies and distemper shots.  Our two outdoor cats are pretty tough and they breezed through the indignity of probing and injections.  But our high-fear tabby, Toby had kind of an emotional mountdown: spitting, struggling, and, when released hid away.

Toby at a calmer moment:

Even poor Milo ran away after his travail.  Here is Milo on a happier day:

It was so traumatic Marian and I had a margarita with dinner tonight.

We felt better but it will take awhile for Milo and Toby to feel better.

6-11, Monday

Usual summer heat today — humid and close. The little bit of rain we got today put us over 4 inches for June so far. After Marian’s run and my walk we picked up some birdseed for our feeder here and for the birds we’ll see next week in the Blue Ridge.  We also looked for a chair for Marian’s workroom upstairs and cashed a travel check Marian has been anticipating for several months.  I cleaned out the storage area underneath the stairs for the first time in a lot of years and toted a lot of it over to Goodwill.  They were happy to get it.

That is about it for today. Mostly just errands and other necessary but not very inspiring work.

Fires

These photos are about a week and a half old showing the Big Turnaround Complex fire that burned across the Georgia-Florida border. You can see just how big this fire was in the bottom false color picture.  We were lucky the fire didn’t reach any heavily populated areas.

6-9 & 6-10, Saturday & Sunday

OK, I jinxed it by bragging how cool May was.  Now June is here and summer has hit with a vengeance.  97 on Saturday and 98 on Sunday.  Sunday’s high was a record.

Everyone was in the pool.

River Cruise

We took a ride up to the St. Johns and took a luncheon cruise.  Unfortunately, one of the assisted-living facilities also was taking the cruise.  Not that I am particularly prejudiced against the elderly — considering I am almost one now — but this group had an awful lot of complainers.  “Which boat are we on?”; “When do you serve lunch?”; “There aren’t enough chairs.”; “The fan is too loud.”; etc.

But the 2-hour cruise was nice.  We aren’t boat people so we don’t get to see urban areas from the water very often.  Once lunch was served we didn’t see any of the complainers anymore and we were able to enjoy the trip without many interruptions.

I took a couple of photos that I thought showed the area in a way I’m not used to seeing it:

I like the perspective of this one.

The Modis building extends beyond the frame of the picture in this one.

Downtown from a distance with $500K condos in the foreground:

I’ll have to search out more of these cruises in this area . Very enjoyable.

Movie We Saw

We saw Oceans 13 on Saturday.  It is an impish, charming movie of the grand caper genre.  The acting is good and the plot satisfyingly twisting.  The locations are attractive and the actors are smart, capable, and alluring.  You come away  feeling that there could be nothing more rewarding and pleasurable than being a high-stakes world-class thief. It just looks like a beautiful life.

Speaking of beautiful lives, King Henry VIII wrote a poem that bears some attention, believe it or not.

Passtime with Good Company

Passtime with good company
I love and shall unto I die.
Grudge whoso will, but none deny,
So God be pleased, this live will I.
For my pastance
Hunt, sing, and dance.
My heart is set
All godely sport
To my comfort.
Who shall me let?

Youth will have needs daliance,
Of good or ill some pastance.
Company me thinketh then best
All thoftes and fantasies to digest.
For idleness
Is chief mistress
Of vices all.
Than who can say
But “pass the day”
Is best of all?

Company with honesty
Is virtue, and vice to flee.
Company is good or ill
But every man hath his free will.
The best ensue,
The worst eschew,
My mind shall be.
Virtue to use,
Vice to refuse,
I shall use me.
“The best ensue,/The worst eschew” his free will.  The characters in Oceans 13 would agree.

6-8, Friday

I spent the day in a basic Dreamweaver course at the local community college. And next Friday I’ll take the advanced course. It’s just 8 hours and the course moves so fast that you don’t have time to practice all the skills you learn in the class. But to get all the information in one place over a single day is very helpful.

That was the entire day. Tonight we watched the shuttle Atlantis launch. I brought the laptop out to the back deck and kept track of the countdown at the Kennedy Space Center site. About ten seconds after the launch the shuttle appeared above the trees with a plume of smoke trailing behind it.

This is kind of what it looked like:

Only we weren’t there and we weren’t looking through a window. But otherwise…

I imagine the crew looking back at the earth, “while Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.”

Home-Thoughts, From the Sea

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish ‘mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-East distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
“Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?”-say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

—– by Robert Browning