That having worked out so well, a box from his dad showed up two days ago despite our saying we had no such player. Reel-to-reel tapes. Now there’s a reely current technology.

Could we would we?

Uh…

A check of Ebay revealed non-working machines and one listed in the hundreds; Richard remarked that there’s a rubber part that wears out, and at the ages of these…

But the box was here.

Oh and. His dad mentioned that Uncle R had had a machine and had donated it to a tech museum and it was in our town! Maybe we could ask to borrow it back?

Uh…

So I put a note on our ward chat list, feeling like that was our last chance. Someone from church responded almost immediately, saying her husband was determined to hold onto one of every technology that might have family recordings on it, and so, yes, they had a reel-to-reel; would we like to borrow it?

Blessings on Sue and Ken, the problem is solved and now we just have to get started.

(Anyone get that Rose Mary Woods reference in the title?)

p.s. Watched my first Republican debate tonight, transfixed by the political theater. Gingrich wants a lunar colony with hopes for it to be the 51st state by his second term. Really. Maybe they could just aim that $99 billion railroad at the sky.

If you want to see an interesting chart of where your congressperson stands, go to Propublica’s page here. But note that half of Congress isn’t telling yet as I write.

Where are your representatives on this? Do they have any technical expertise or, if they’re uncertain, are they willing to learn from people who do? Do the merits of a cause matter to them?

Rupert Murdoch presented himself as an arbiter of moral authority on the subject of SOPA/PIPA, bashing opponents of this poorly written, poorly thought out legislation.

Follow the money, because he certainly always does.

Okay, let’s go back to InfoWorld. They have a story about seven people running two companies that allegedly raked in $175 million via pirated movies, books, software, etc, the very thing the supporters of SOPA and PIPA are talking about. The alleged perps are in various countries oversees.

And with the help of the court in Virginia and the help of those countries, four have been arrested and the sites have been shut down. All done under current law here and abroad. The system as it now is worked. Are there still problems in some countries and on other sites? Yes of course–my own book has been pirated and there are dishonest people stealing it and I know that. Life is imperfect.

But throwing out the due process clause of the Constitution–it’s just unfathomable. Utterly unfathomable.

Progress has been made but it’s not over by a long shot. Please keep writing/calling/emailing your representatives to defeat SOPA and PIPA. Your Internet and mine depends on it.

p.s. On a happier note, I got to see and hold Jasmin and Andrew’s newborn daughter Genevieve tonight. Dimples and thick dark hair and the cutest face you could hope for. She’s absolutely perfect.

The Awl writer wasn’t convinced about this whole Occupy thing. She states strongly that she believes inflammatory rhetoric shuts down rational thought (boy, ain’t that the truth) and so it took two weeks before she decided to go see for herself what it was all about there in Oakland. She had no use for potential mobs.

What she saw was not what she expected to get.

I puzzled all day over her saying the news helicopter left and then the ABC and CBS twitter feeds shut down simultaneously one minute before the police moved in on the crowd (and we all know how that went). Wouldn’t the press want that story? Why would they stop? Are we really and incredibly at the point where the UK was recently, where only the rival Guardian was keeping tabs on the likes of Rupert Murdoch? No, I just don’t believe that. I mentioned it to Richard, hoping he had a reasonable explanation.

That was easy, he felt: the chopper had to refuel, as they said. The cops waited till there was nobody above to keep an eye on them–and then both feeds would have stopped together like that if the cops illegally jammed them.

That’s a big if. And yet–those feeds did stop. The writer showed screenshots.

The mayor of Richmond next door was so angry at the mayor of Oakland that she announced loudly that she would be marching part of a ten mile trek with the protesters. Good for her.

Don asks what a solution would be. I have one, for starters: I would sit the entire Congress down in Mr. Heacock’s high school American History class that I was in during the school year ending in this country’s bicentennial celebration, where he went on at such great length and passion about the enduring importance of the Glass-Steagal Act to this country’s financial stability that I have never forgotten it.

Education–and funding good education (remember when you could fund a full year’s college tuition at a state school off a teenager’s summer job? I’m only 52, not a GI Bill generation, and I do)–rocks.

Sure!

And so that’s what we did yesterday afternoon.

Setting out, though, we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, so I reminded her that my hearing in a car wasn’t great.

That, as it turned out, was a good thing.

She was sure we were on the same page politically, and had a lot of opinions; while I struggled to keep my eyes on the road but still keep up with what she was saying, she was enjoying her audience. We are quite fond of each other.

She didn’t like how her favored presidential candidate was being treated by the press. I sympathized.

Wasn’t it terrible how Obama was trying to force everybody into one big union?

“Huh!” I said with a smile, delighted I’d heard her that time without having to make her repeat. “That one would grab big headlines. I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even our little Merc every day, but somehow I missed that one.”

She went on at length about the healthcare bill. I, blissfully deaf and cheerfully missing the point, got a word in: wasn’t it wonderful that my daughters were going to be able to get health insurance now? When one got turned down for no good reason whatsoever, and the other–well. She’s covered under one of the university micro-plans that the bill is phasing out, meaning that, till then, her maximum allowable coverage for medications is $2,000 a year.  Her doctor wanted to put her on a med that costs more than her annual income; she needs that med to treat her ITP, and appealed to the manufacturer because they do sometimes provide a cut rate for those in need, but they turned her down on the grounds that she has insurance.

Which it isn’t, really. But after next year, I think is the time frame, she’ll be able to get covered. Isn’t that wonderful?!

Finally, the woman tapped my arm, smiling, and said, “I think we’re on different sides; let’s talk about something else.”

We had a perfectly lovely time of it all. She got to meet new people with a deep interest in things she’s been wanting to learn about, she got her feeder, she got some seed, she added in a suet cake and wire cage after I got more to refill mine and we talked about how to show the birds the place was worth checking out: hang a stick. Let them perch near it first to get a good look.

And I think she actually heard some of what I had to say: because I was able to avoid the distractions of negative emotions and to concentrate on just enjoying the time I had with her, without letting all that Ailes America rile me up.  Who knew that deafness could contribute to maintaining a sense of closeness.

I avoided the temptation (but I won’t here) to stir things up by quoting Thomas Friedman from when he put context around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators for those who don’t get it:

“Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.” He quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying, “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

To women of her age, that could well have been part of her own retirement going poof. It is criminal.

We, yes, we, are the 99%. Heck–I guess we’ve all been put in one really big union, haven’t we?

A few days ago I saw a big fat old gray one chase a young slender black one away and across the yard, up a tree six feet or so, and then the black one jumped to a nearby trunk and came down…

But the gray one, who’d raced notably slower than the other, was stopping to catch his breath.

The black one stopped and turned around and watched him. Meantime, another small black one took advantage of the whole scene by sneaking around both of them and going for the patio.

The next day: a smallish black one was nibbling peacefully away at what the birds toss down, minding its own business; had another started nibbling, he’d have shared, the young ones often do.

The big gray approached slowly, cautiously from behind, easing over to the side to stay out of the line of view, watching carefully, gets closer, closer, and then LEAPS onto the black one from behind to bite him! They instantly turned into a rolling, struggling, circular hamster ball with tail fluff coming from behind, totally out for blood, neither willing to give up. The gray’s got the weight but the black’s got the agility and speed.

Yin yang motif. How they roll in a circle like that just amazes me. But hey guys, I don’t want to see anyone hurt.

I opened the door and called out to them to stop, but I could have been a chickadee for all they cared. I threw a shoe halfway to them, careful not to have any chance of hitting them but trying to break it up. They could not have cared less, I was harmless and they knew it and the attacker and attacked weren’t and they knew it. It went on for what felt like a very long time.

The black one managed to grab the gray’s head face to face and grip it between his paws long enough to confirm for me where the tattered ears on the bigger ones come from.

They leaped in a blur up to a tall but empty flower pot, rolled in, continued with me trying to figure out by which tail tip showed when who was winning, and finally both leaped to the lip at once, apart. The gray stared away. The black one looked straight at me.

Having established himself, I think that’s the one that tried to take me on via the skylight later. I’ve wondered what my gray hair looks like to them.

They breathed hard a few moments, then reenacted the previous chase scene, except this time the young black squirrel was doing the chasing–and neither of them was moving very fast but rather clearly gingerly, and the gray was going to the right across the yard and away from the trees that offer a view of the patio. Vanquished. Away with the bully.

The gray came back today. Nothing around but the birds and me watching from inside, but it was clear he was scared. He approached slowly. Warily. He started to reach a paw to the patio–and pulled back, fast! Tried again. It took four times for him to work up the bravado to come onto the concrete and dare stand under that birdfeeder again.

Be careful whom you pick on.

(The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America includes, for good reason,  “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”)

The reactions of Wall Street, the New York police, several DC politicians in particular…

Some here may remember what I said (though I gave few details at the time as to why) after a guy in Stanford Hospital’s billing department stole my name and number and tried to make me give him my credit card information over the phone for a supposed bill collection agency for an amount that, actually, I had overpaid my account by because they were slow to update their system and had re-billed it. So clearly he thought I was an easy target. The man was sufficiently vicious in tone that I considered calling the police.

What I wrote was: “The angrier someone gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.”

The protesters have my admiration for their efforts not to show anger, not to give any justification for the crackdowns that have happened, but simply to demand that the laws favoring the 1% change in order for us to have a more just society that creates hope for our future. My favorites so far:

1. A sign held up saying, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who believes in free health care for all. You’re thinking of Jesus.”

2. Here is the long version by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at Columbia University, writing for Vanity Fair; below is what he said to the protestors in person. He noted that he and they were not allowed to use a bullhorn to address the crowd, not allowed to make themselves heard by any means other than the crowd repeating his phrases loudly to try to pass them towards the back. He wondered to them why this should be so.

But there are video cameras in smartphones and there is YouTube. (Blessings on those at that link who offer a transcription for those of us who need it.)

“Our financial markets have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital and manage risk, but they’ve misallocated capital and created risk. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism! That’s not a market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.”

Amen.

Tonight, they announced at the school board meeting that not only were they interested in buying it, they had entered into a formal agreement towards doing exactly that. From the developer–a little late, but hey.

Let the soccer games on the suddenly-available field begin. Our grandchildren will have room to run after all.

(There’s a meeting set for public debate before the offer is to be formally signed.)

People spoke up, people showed up, and people kept speaking and kept coming, and the city finally heard.

Well then. Might as well combine trips like a responsible driver during Spare the Air and finally go order my new glasses across the street.

The possibly-as-much-as-40-ish fellow taking care of me asked about insurance blahblahblah, the usual, and then took me completely by surprise by asking if I were a member of AARP.

Okay, I must be getting old, that took me straight back to a mental connection to it, fair or not, now, that I have never been able to shake: to the scene in the news of well-dressed well-to-do old people rioting–there is no other word for it–with Dan Rostenkowski, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, cowering in his car in Chicago as they pounded on it. They were angry at his quite reasonable bill proposing to modify Social Security benefits for those who have utterly no need of the money. (Let’s see…checking Wikipedia… A version of that bill passed in ‘83? Sounds about right.) They found it the highest insult that their monthly checks might become tainted in their own minds as, you know, welfare, their pride more important than any appeals to generational fairness. Tax their benefits?!

Right. And Warren Buffett needs those SS checks too. We’re still arguing over that, aren’t we.

Threatening to throw Rostenkowski out of office wasn’t good enough–they started rocking his car to the point he thought they were going to flip it over.

(Side note, added later: from that Wikipedia page, I’m guessing my memory was wrong and that it was actually the seniors being asked to help pay for their new Medicare prescription coverage that caused that scene. Anyway.)

Knowing it would take far more words and time to relay or explain any of that than the situation at all called for, I stifled, swallowed, nearly lost it, and then finally said in just the very mildest voice you could imagine, “That would be a loud No.”

He’d been watching my face, waiting for an answer, and at that the guy lost it, laughing, and then I did too, adding, “And besides! I’m only 52!”

He tried throwing in a “You can sign up at 49 these days” and I motioned, Cut! Cut! Noooooo!

He was rolling.

And dang.

There it was. Chest pain. Just enough. (And how’s that for irony.)

I tell you, the thing is as wily and obnoxious as a squirrel with an open jar of peanut butter in sight on the counter and the kitchen door left open. Thank you very much, with the help of my doctors I am keeping that lid on tight and the door firmly closed.

I spent the afternoon puzzling at great length over a pattern idea that had been bouncing around in there for a year, reacting to the day by trying to finally get that unfinished idea to become one with the yarn.

Got it. Good. Time to buckle down and get to work.

p.s. I have to come back and add: watching your heart valve on a screen is really, really cool. You’re seeing the physicality of your very life in front of you, and it’s clapping its hands for joy.

But to me it is one more example of why every vote counts.

They’ve been back. City Hall fight, round three.

The San Jose Merc printed my letter to the editor recently asking why on earth, with so much housing having gone up in the last two years here with no thought to the impact on schools and no place to put the children, didn’t our school district buy the almost three acre daycare site that was up for sale? It abutted school property. It was a logical fit. There was no other parcel around with an undeveloped field like that to be had anywhere else; why sell it to a developer and increase that very problem? My children had had room to run around on the playground during recess, but now they were adding multi-story classroom space there. Just where is my grandson’s generation supposed to play?

Now the developer is saying they want to put in ten houses and comply with zoning this time, having said previously they would walk away from it all if they didn’t get their twenty-three. (And they threatened to sue, too, but that was all bluster, no court would have upheld them.)

But. The law says they have to provide low-income housing with any new development. Can’t they just please buy their way out of that one, they want to know? (Rules? What rules? Since when did rules apply to them? They’ve already shown what they’re made of.)

I like to think that by speaking up in a way that was visible to all, I in my very small way helped give the school district the certainty they needed that the public was behind them: because now, at long last, they have announced they do indeed want to buy the place for future school space. In the expense and the race for it, they have asked not to be required to submit an environmental impact report, in that they do not plan to change the field nor the structures for now but simply to have it to bank towards future needs.

A neighbor saw an article in the town’s small paper and made sure everybody else around here did too.

Yo school district dudes. You are so late to the party. But finally, finally you came.

Now, newspaper, take it further and tell us what time that planning commission meeting is going to be held–I want to be there. The Brown Act gives me the right to be there. This is the same planning commission of whom Greg Scharff, one of the City Council members, asked in May, when Council was to vote on the 23-home proposal, “You’ve spent a lot of time on this. Haven’t you?”

The fellow he was looking at in the Commission’s seats, the same one that had talked to our neighborhood group earlier as if the proposal were all a done deal all along and he was just trying to ease us into it, looked back at him and nodded yes.

“May I ask: WHY?”

I wanted to jump out of my seat and exclaim, Yes! Yes! THIS is why I voted for you, Mr. Scharff! THANK YOU!!

Now we need another round of the Council’s support.

Jury duty, day one: instructions to check online at 11:00.

Instructions at 11:00: check for instructions at 5:00.

Instructions at 5:00: check for instructions at 11:00. (I’m sure a lot of you know the drill.)

They could require me to show up five cities away in the morning rush hour. Technically, though, I’m already out of there because I asked and was told parking at San Jose would be several city blocks’ walk in the sun and impossible to do in under two minutes. Exactly the thing that would set off inflammation in my brain, eyes, and heart.

I mentioned about the parking to my doctor and he offered me a note faster than I could request it.

The courts are underfunded like everything else and the paperwork appears not to have been processed yet. Part of me hopes, moreover, to be able to play my part in the process of granting someone their fair trial. And so I check my juror number, my pocket scissors already off my keychain.

And wait.