Not a Potted Plant

Apparently, on Prairie Home Companion, the host said something to the effect of: People from states that have no business being states — states like Kansas, Colorado, …, Montana — are everything that’s wrong with this country.

This, naturally, caught my interest. I tried to chase down what exactly was said because it fits in with some things I have been talking about here. I couldn’t find it, but by putting that quote into Google minus the listing of the states, brought up Burt’s Real State post on the first page.

Anyhow, I can’t verify the quote. It was mentioned on Facebook by a friend who heard it first-hand and said that the guy actually went on and on about it. Any further information on this would be appreciated.

Health:

[H1] The story of how we realized that it might not be a good idea to put Radium in everything.

[H2] The case against appeals to Paleofantasy.

[H3] Even before the science came out, I’ve been convinced that sleep deprivation is a significant factor in weight gain. According to a new study, it can start in a couple of days.

[H4] Advances in IVF.

[H5] Corporate Wellness programs don’t really save money. Should we file this one away with the “savings” of preventative medicine?

Content:

[C1] Jmanga, which sold digital Japanese comics, shut down and everybody lost the collections they purchased. Amazon’s biggest weapon in the ebook wars is that they are the ones we have a pretty good idea aren’t going anywhere.

[C2] I had somehow missed the whole Tacitus-Malaysia scandal. paidContent has a story on how demand for content leads to such corruption.

[C3] The dark underbelly of Miss USA.

Neat:

[N1] Bringing the dormant Six Flags New Orleans back to life… with animated GIFs.

[N2] Coolest sandcastle ever.

[N3] Pi is a cool number. Here are seven other cool numbers.

Science:

[S1] Can we close the black-white IQ gap through M&M’s?

[S2] Will the world calendar ever be reset, as it was with BC/AD? I can only really imagine that when or if we inhabit more than one planet.

[S3] Sex in space could be dangerous.

[S4] Will human instrumentality become a reality?

Technology:

[Te1] In the age of smartphones, what’s a GPS maker to do? Also, the history of Google Street View. One of the really neat things about using Google Maps on my phone is that when I get there, it’ll use Street View to show me what the building I am looking for looks like.

[Te2] The fascinating story of a call center dude who was fired for his job (with a government in Canada) for making a computer game (that those who fired him never bothered to actually play).

[Te3] Are we returning to the big, bad days of the AT&T monopoly? Whether that aspect of it is true or not (and the article isn’t really about AT&T), I don’t think nationwide WiFi is the solution. Meanwhile, Georgia rejected a bill aimed at banning municipal fiber networks.

World:

[W1] Europe even has classy robots.

[W2] I remain baffled to the extent that people who believe that Global Warming will end civilization as we know it nonetheless oppose nuclear energy. So, credit to those with an open mind. Japan may be coming back around.

Employment:

[E1] If you aren’t an expert, fake it. People prefer it that way. They also prefer charisma, which maybe isn’t innate.

[E2] Here is what you need to know about coffee at work.

[E3] Matthew Yglesias looks at our long-term unemployment problem. Peter Cappelli adds more context on my takeaway, which is that a lot of it comes down to a refusal to train.

[E4] What if bankers really do earn their bonuses? That’s an oddly depressing thought.

Transportation:

[Tr1] I miss the designs of some of the older cars, but the utilitarian in me appreciates that the convergence of automobile design is largely a product of all the makers having found the best way to make a car and going with it.

[Tr2] Jeremy Stahl critiques Alfred Twu’s map of what a truly national high-speed rail network might look like for the US and adds a number of insights.

Politics:

[P1] I’ve been thinking about this lately, but perhaps the biggest way that Republicans can reach out to minorities has little or nothing to do with the party itself and more to do with its constituent networks. Evangelicals, for instance, and the NRA.

So, today we drove out to Umatilla to have the baby’s hip checked. While on the table at the ultrasound room, she pooped all over the sheets. As the ultrasound tech put the dirty laundry in the laundry heap, I made the blindingly obvious observation, “This place must have to do a lot of dirty laundry.”

She replied that most ultrasounds are not on live, poopy babies, but that they do have to clean the sheets in between visitors time. She commented that they do it in-house.

“Isn’t that always the case?” I asked. I mean, I would have to think that it would be in the interest of just about every such clinic to have some monster washing machines. She said that no, actually, most places have cleaning services. She then said that when she was an ultrasound tech in Austin, they actually hired a cleaning service that trucked it to San Antonio.

Clancy is, for reasons I will not get into at the moment, ineligible for life insurance. So with my career on hold, if something happens to her, I really don’t know what I’ll do. Not to get too serious in an otherwise light-hearted post, but there is a disconcerting vulnerability there.

Well, I thought I had found my solution. If something happens to Clancy, Lain and I would move to Austin where I am going to start a laundry service for hospitals and clinics that doesn’t require trucking clothes to San Antonio to be cleaned. There is apparently a need.

But wait, somebody is already doing that. So why in the world would a clinic in Austin be shipping laundry to San Antonio? Curses, foiled again.

One way we define a “state” here in the USA is as a unit of regional government. But states are also ways that we define ourselves as local communities and from which we take shared identities. And overlapping between the formal governmental states and the units of identification are regions of economic activity. The map above sets out one way of looking at regional activity by mapping login registries from “wheresgeorge.com“, a site where people track their currency by serial number. (I found it at NPR.) I think there is some important information to be gleaned here. Continue Reading →

It was a big week in the Himmelreich-Truman household. And in the city of Callie, Arapaho.

1. After exactly three years of service, my wife gave her ninety-day notice to Baxter Hospital.
2. The following day, she received a Letter of Intent for a new position elsewhere.
3. The hospital seems to be in a position where it feels like being Bregna material (explanation below) is about as important as the job you do. A recent pair of terminations reinforced this point.
4. We turned over the keys to our old house.
5. Callie’s bowling alley was torn down.

Clancy’s imminent departure has been known for some time now. She gave them a year’s notice because she wanted to give them every opportunity to recruit someone and not be short-handed. It turned out not to make much of a difference. The ultimate reason for her leaving is that the position ceased to be a good fit for her. The job description changed over time, as did her priorities. They technically found a replacement for her, but are still going to be short two FP-OB’s. As it stands, they’re interviewing people who wouldn’t be able to start until 2015. She wants to change her career trajectory. Baxter is unwilling to accommodate that.

The position is out east. Details on that to follow. We’ve been burned before, so we’re not counting on it materializing since it depends on things like state and federal funding that is always a precarious wager. It’s a one-year training job. It pays a little over a third of what she gets now. Money is going to be tight since, unlike her residency and previous fellowship, it’s unlikely that I will be able to work. We want the baby to have a parent at home. That’s the bad news. The good news is a fresh start with an employer that looks at the wide variety of skills she brings to the table – as well as the desire to gain more skills – as an asset rather than merely something to be grudgingly accommodated.

If there was any doubt to the extent to which we would never feel welcome here, it ended right after her resignation when her best friend at the hospital was let go. First, a bit about Bregna. Bregna is actually a former employer of mine. They are infamous in the Colosse area for being the employer that cycles through IT people at a very quick clip. The average employee lasts less than four months. On employee satisfaction surveys, they are one of the five worst employers in the entire nation. Which sounds crazy. Crazy like a fox, I’ve determined. You see, Bregna was ever in search for a very particular kind of employee. And I’ve become convinced that the bullcrud they put you through was essentially a test to see whether or not you were Bregna material. Are you the kind of guy that doesn’t mind your restroom breaks being monitored for duration and frequency? Are you the kind of guy who wants every room, hallway, and restroom you enter logged into a system so they can give you advice on how to be more efficient? Do you think it signals your company cares when they tell you that you need to get a new roommate because your current roommate left the company? If so, then you are who Bregna wants. When I left, and they told me that they were sorry to see me go, I didn’t know whether to be proud of the deception or horrified that I could pose as an android so successfully.

No matter what her skills, Clancy was not Bregna material. Or Baxter material, in this case. They didn’t monitor restroom breaks, but they were looking for a very particular kind of individual. Clancy wasn’t it. And while they tolerated her because they desperately need someone to do what she does, it’s not sustainable to be tolerated. Nobody was fooled. They wanted somebody else and she wanted to be somewhere else. As convenient as it’s all been, it simply couldn’t go on forever. The axe falling on those around her only reinforced the point.

Which brings us to Callie and our failed experiment here. I came to Callie with as open mind as I could muster. I wasn’t sure about how well I would do in a town of this size, as far away from towns of notably larger size. But I was willing to try. I was going to join a bowling league. I like to bowl. It would be a good way to meet people. A starting point to insert myself into the local social community. The folks here seemed nice. They are nice. They like to hunt and fish. I don’t, really.

I do like to bowl. The bowling alley closed in between the interview and our arrival. It was always supposed to reopen, but each planned purchase fell through. And the building stood there, reminding me of what was supposed to be here that wasn’t. A home, if not a permanent one then one I could call my home for a while. The building stood vacant and the town never felt like home. Ever the hope that someone might move in. It never happened. And this week, they tore it down. The illusion was demolished.

And we left the house for another. We loved that house. We did. But even with that wonderful house, things went wrong somehow. Our relationship with the landlords deteriorated. I somehow found myself having to clean the door of a garage that they planned to tear down. A pipe leaked and I found myself cleaning the dirtiest water I’ve ever seen off a basement floor that was always half-finished. The landlords were upset that I hadn’t dismantled the stove and cleaned the parts.

It’s all quite unfortunate. The place where my daughter was born will always be a mostly bad memory. The hospital she was born at will be a place her mother was miserable. We have our baby girl, we have our wonderful dog, and everything important to us is leaving town with us.

I sincerely hope that, going forward, I will be a more pleasant person. Not to mention a happier one. These past three years have taken their toll on me.

The fishing Padres

Only know how to bring it

Against the Dodgers.

Unsurprisingly, my nomination for 2013 will be going to Ken at Popehat:

Rep. Jon Lundberg views his position as an elected representative the way a 13-year-old boy views a tube sock.

Truly, I am awed.

Several years ago, when we were living in Deseret, I was proud of my ingenuity. You see, it was April 15th. We were living in an apartment we were about to move out of. And that was when the Mormon missionaries showed up. They’d been coming around quite regularly. Our complex was a den of iniquity in need of saving. And I was a little nice to them at the outset, which gave them the impression that they had… ahhh… a prayer… of converting me, I guess. Anyway, when they stopped by, I was really not in the mood to deal with them. But then I remembered! It’s April 15th. I told them that I desperately need to work on my taxes. They went their merry way. I moved, and never saw them again. Apparently, the Mormon Intelligence Community was not able to track my movements (this is not always the case, I should point out). I still have the Book of Mormon they gave me, marked passages (1 Nephi 8 is the big one I remember, though there was another one) and all. I even read it – start to finish – last year.

Earlier today on Mindless Diversions, I referred to Lain as “My Little Bundle of Excuses”… for why I stopped keeping up with the Fringe book club, why blogging output has fallen, just about everything.

Today, Lain gave me another great excuse. A Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesperson showed up on our door. Now, I came close to being a Kirby salesperson myself. He also seemed developmentally disabled (perhaps something as minor as a speech impediment). It was not a situation I was anxious to say “Hellz no!” Even though we’re about to have to start pinching pennies and a good vacuum cleaner was not high on our list. If I couldn’t say no then, why would I expect to be able to say no after he gives me the presentation? It’s an impressive presentation, and given Clancy’s aversion to dirt and greater general concern about cleanliness, he might be able to sell her.

Then Lain cried. I told him, “Sorry, not interested. The baby has been a wreck today.”

He said he understood and went on his merry way.