OmegaMom

When we adopted OmegaDotter, we had A Plan.  That plan was to–as soon as possible, i.e., a year after signing on the dotted line for the dotter–apply for another adoption from China.

Well, that first year was…difficult.  Having a baby in the house is life-altering, tiring, exhilarating, fun, wearing.  And then I got laid off.  Oops.  So we decided to put it off another year.  But then that next year, OmegaDad had some health issues that required all our attention.  So we decided to put it off another year.  Then we learned that OmegaDad’s health issues put us off the list for China, including the special needs list.  So we sulked and dithered and dilly-dallied.  We thought about other programs.

One of the other countries we thought about–for a very, very short while–was Vietnam.  But it was never a real serious discussion.  For one thing, it was much, much more expensive than China.  And while our first year was chugging along, word was building that corruption was rife in Vietnam adoptions.  In 2003, the U.S. put a total freeze on adoptions from Vietnam until it could be demonstrated that the adoption system had been cleaned up to the point where the U.S. Embassy could feel relatively assured that the corruption had been rooted out.  In 2006, Vietnam and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding re-opening international adoptions from Vietnam to the U.S.

Almost immediately, problems began resurfacing.  We’re talking mere months after that MOU was signed.

Things, IMO, went downhill from there.

Part of the problem was that the wait for adoptions from China had drastically slowed down.  And some of the thousands of potential adoptive parents who were desperate for a child began to turn to other countries for an "interim" adoption–figuring that any adoption from another country would be finalized long enough before China got around to them that they’d still fit the qualifications (a year–or was it six months?!  it’s never been quite clear–between adding any new child to the family).  Vietnam had a reputation for being quick, if you were willing to spend the money, so families started queuing up.

And then, in October and November 2007, families who were trying to adopt from Vietnam started getting Notices of Intent to Deny from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (or whatever its official title is these days).  The NOIDs were based on suspicions or indications that something was amiss with the proposed adoptions; that the children in question were not actually abandoned, not actually the children described by the documentation, maybe the result of baby-selling, maybe the result of kidnapping.  The potential parents, alas, were already in Vietnam expecting to be able to bring their babies home, and the NOIDs stopped them cold.  Many decided to simply stay in Vietnam with the babies until things cleared up.

Rumors began building in the Vietnam adoption community that the U.S. would not renew the MOU when it expired, in September of this year.

A week or two ago, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi issued a "Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam", along with a "Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam".  The warning specifically states "recent field investigations have revealed incidents of serious adoption irregularities, including forged or altered documentation, mothers paid, coerced or tricked into releasing their children, and children offered for adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents."  The summary states that U.S. officials in Vietnam had investigated more than 300 cases over a six-month period; to give an idea of the percent of potential adoptions investigated, there were 828 adoptions from Vietnam by U.S. parents in 2007.

It seems pretty clear that this is not a witch hunt by U.S. officials.  The stories in the summary make it plain that corruption and bribery are rampant in the process. 

The problem is, of course, that potential adoptive parents are wildly emotionally involved.  It’s practically impossible to expect potential adoptive parents to say–when confronted with an official piece of paper that claims that the baby you have been holding and cuddling and thinking of as your "own" for two weeks and that the Vietnamese courts have declared is your "own"–"Oh.  You’re right.  We can’t adopt this child–the evidence is too overwhelming that her birthmother was scammed out of her baby.  Here.  Take her back."  So the adoptive families pull strings, and heartstrings, trying to get the NOIDs revoked, removed, the immigration visa approved, ogodogodletusgohomewithherplease.

I’d like to think (ahem.  See my halo here?  It’s nice and shiny!  And I got it cheap!) that in that situation, OmegaDad and I would do what we thought was the ethical thing.  It is, of course, easy for me to say; we are safe and sound and working on our dotter’s sixth year home with us, and even the rumblings of corruption in the Chinese adoption system seem to have cranked up after her adoption.  And I have already said, in the midst of another post, that at this point, if someone came forward with evidence that her birthfamily had not abandoned her, I would fight tooth and claw to keep her with us…though I would also like to think (halo, remember?) that we’d do whatever possible to make sure we could take her to China on a regular basis to visit her birthfamily.

So when a good internet bud of mine forwards a plea to call, email, write, fax senators, congresscritters, and the INS/USCIS on behalf of one of the families who has been stuck in Vietnam since last fall, facing a second NOID, I am left unsettled and disturbed.  My heart breaks for the adoptive parents.  My heart also breaks, though, for the birthfamily.  I feel I cannot, in good conscience, do any such thing without full knowledge of the particulars of the case (and I tend to suspect, given that the word is the INS/USCIS is going to issue a second NOID, that the particulars are pretty egregious).  What if it’s the case where the birthmother’s baby was withheld from her by a hospital so that she would pay the hospital bill for a premature birth?  Or the one where the birthfamily, fallen on hard times, was told by an orphanage official, "Hey–leave the baby with us for a while until you get back on your feet…We’ll take care of him, and you can take him back home when you’re better off and more able to deal with it…"?  Or the one where the birthmother was a young single woman who was being housed in a maternity home, and told, after the birth, "Oh, by the way, unless you can pay us back the year’s income that it cost us to house you, we’re going to have to take your baby away…"?

In the end, I am sorry to say, it still seems to come down to money.

(For a very worthwhile read, go to Voices For Vietnam Adoption Integrity.)

The newsies are agog at the notion that Miley Cyrus has (gasp!) revealed herself (gasp!) in a truly artsy pic by Annie Leibowitz, and by (gasp!) a picture of her lounging against her boyfriend that (gasp!) shows her midriff (o the shock, o the horror!).  Stories are written saying that she is setting foot on the primrose path to ruin that has been taken by other teen stars lately–specifically Britney and her ilk.

Our culture is totally schizophrenic.  On the one hand, we’re practically drowning in pictures and videos of scantily clad females doing all sorts of things that one might expect scantily clad–or unclad–females to be doing.  Licentiousness abounds.  On the other, a 15-year-old has a few pics taken and suddenly Moms Of Pop Culture Unite to prostrate themselves upon their chaises longues, hands to their foreheads, having the vapors that the Queen of Pre-Teen Clean is allowing herself to be defiled.  The hordes of teeny tweeny Hannah Montana fans are suddenly going to transform into an army of mini-Lolitas, and it’s All Miley’s Fault.  Prudery rears its ugly head.

OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here, big time.

OmegaMom is also rolling her eyes at an article about "When Young Teachers Go Wild On The Web".

Kozmik All help us:  22-year-old teachers have MySpace pages.  And they…and they…omigawd, how can my trembling fingers write this??  They have pictures on those pages!  Pictures of (gasp!) themselves holding (gasp!) bottles of tequila!  Or, even worse, paintings they have done showing women’s lingerie peeping out from under upflung skirts.  Or (shudder!) paintings of frontal nudes!

(One does wonder if those paintings were anything like these…)

And they say things!  Like "rocking out with some deaf kids.  It.  Is.  Awesome." 

Or talking about bl0w j0bs.

Or showing posters about cartoon sperm.

What is wrong with these teachers?!  Have they no decorum?!  No reserve?!  Aren’t they aware they are molding young children’s minds?!  How dare they have lives of their own!  How dare they have thoughts of their own!

Now, granted, each and every one of the things mentioned above could be taken too far.  Let’s not show pictures of orgies featuring oneself in the buff.  But in and of themselves, my opinion about the examples in the article is…well…um…hell, these are 20-something teachers.

I was party-hearty girl until I reached my early 30s.  Well, not as "hearty" as some, but I went out, I drank, I partied, I danced, I stayed up all weekend long, I had hangovers, I talked sex with all my buds, I toked joints, I had sex, I listened to rock-n-roll.  And if the web and blogs had been around then, I’d probably have blogged about all of the above.

It might have been drearily boring.  I have to admit that my overwhelming response to most blogs or MySpace pages put out by folks in their late teens and early 20s is that they are an appallingly vacuous, inane collection of stream of consciousness gossip, in conjunction with angsty poetry.  This is why, when I use the "next blog" button on Blogger, I go through about fifty blogs before I find something I would consider even vaguely interesting.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Shoetree, the dotter’s kindergarten teacher, having a webpage with a poster about cartoon sperm, or paintings of frontal nudes, or talking about "rocking out" with anyone; she is, after all, older than me, and more staid.  But if she did I wouldn’t care, because she’s a damn fine kindy teacher who my dotter adores.  Which is, after all this bloviating, my main point:  Folks, teachers have Real Lives.  Yes!  I know it’s a surprise, but, hey, there it is, and it’s my pleasure to pass this piece of arcane knowledge on to you.  Teachers are Real, Live Human Beings who, amazingly enough, have been known to go to parties, or fall in love, or be indiscreet.

In a refreshing departure from administrative powerhunger, some administrator actually said that webpages should be handled case by case.  (What, no standardized testing?!)  On the other hand, another administrator type had this to say:  "We all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach…"

Dear lord.  We are doomed; the only people who will go into teaching or politics twenty years from now are people who are upright, humorless prigs…

When I was growing up, there was a saying:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.

Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target.  Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.

So what’s changed?  What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide?  What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube?  What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?

Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet.  It’s MySpace’s fault!  It’s YouTube’s fault!  My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there!  Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.

Seriously.  In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing.  Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess.  Or morals.  Or a sense of proportion.  Or something.  What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"? 

Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase.  I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles.  She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me.  And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.

The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important:  It’s what you think of yourself.  It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing.  It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing.  It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.

These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course.  You have to work on them.  And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude.  It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…

These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this.  The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence.  They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace.  Now, I realize that names hurt.  They sting.  You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back.  And it continues even when you’re forty-something.

But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life.  Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.

Like many people, I read the news from Eldorado, Texas, with a pre-emptive fear.  I feared another Waco.  They feared another Waco, sending a horde of ambulances and fire equipment out with with police.  Thankfully, Waco II never materialized, and, as of this writing, 534 women and children have been "removed" from the compound.

As many of my readers know, I’m not religious.  I’m vaguely spiritual in a woo-esque manner.  I find organized religion to be, on the whole, suspect; in general I think that it’s yet another way for humans to exert control on one another, using their "privileged" interpretation of written texts about mysterious omniscient beings to exhort their followers to do This Thing or That Thing, and collect money at the same time.

Certainly, this particular offshoot of Mormonism (not mainstream Mormonism, by any means) has its fair share of that entire outlook on religion.  Young teenage girls are married off to older men with nary a yea or nay allowed.  Those older man–pillars of the church, all–get a bevy of lithe, untouched girls of their very own.  The younger men…well, they’re SOL.  Gotta pay their dues, work their way up through the church ranks, become one of the Chosen, before they, too, can partake of the youthful bounty.

And yet.

And yet.

"Imminent danger" says the warrant.  How many were in "imminent danger"?  For how long?  Why was it suddenly necessary to do this?

In the pictures, I see women and children who are weeping and confused.  Being ripped from their family lives, thrust into the national spotlight, children sent off to foster families, women off to (I suppose) shelters. 

"They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it."  These are the words of one woman who left the compound with her children years ago.

What will these people do?

What will happen to these children?

How can a judge claim that all of them are in "imminent danger", when a week ago they were just living their lives and only one girl called in seeking help?

I am so torn.  I despise a culture that keeps women barefoot, pregnant, and strictly limited in their life’s choices.  I cannot condone girls being thrust into sexual relationships at the ordering of some church elder.  At the same time, I think of, say, my dotter being suddenly ripped from our household and stuck in a foster family, with absolutely no idea why, no concept of it. 

If the authorities had reason to think that specific girls or children were in "imminent danger", then those girls/children should have been removed.  Not the wholesale splitting of families that this raid has engendered.

In addition, a similar raid back in the ’50s led to the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints withdrawing even further from the world, isolating themselves and producing a societal situation where it was "us against them".  This raid will no doubt cement that feeling within this group…making it more difficult to effect change or move in when there is obvious and substantial evidence of abuse.

From birth to death, one is ever-learning, ever-growing. The collection of serendipity we call "the Internet" and "blogs" helps with this process–sometimes in a way that is, frankly, shallow, silly, a bit of mental fluff and floss, and sometimes in a way that makes you stop and go, "Whoa. I didn’t know that."

While OmegaDad was out of town, I indulged myself with a few-hour binge on YouTube watching ’80s music videos. I did Tom Petty. Queensryche. Bon Jovi. Joe Satriani. Dire Straits. Van Halen. Pat Benetar. The Clash. John (Cougar) Mellencamp. Midnight Oil. U2. I did a whole slew of U2, including a live performance of Sunday, Bloody Sunday from "Rattle and Hum", which I’m sure most of my older readers have seen, but I haven’t:

Then, today, I wandered over to Whatever, and encountered this version of U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love):

And I thought to myself, "Wow! What a great way to use U2’s song!"

And then I did a little googling, and discovered I must be the oldest person on earth to finally realize that U2 wrote that song as a tribute to Martin Luther King. Um. Yes, somehow I managed to get through the ’80s rockin’ out to U2 and never really listened to the words or learned that little fact.

So: Ever-learning, ever-changing, ever-growing. That is OmegaMom.

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of MLK. I was old enough that I should remember it, but don’t. We didn’t watch much news, and I spent my time with the TV watching Star Trek and Twilight Zone and Dark Shadows, with a hand grasping the antenna (because that was the only way we really got a good signal).

Children who are growing up these days simply won’t have any concept of what it was like back then. (Actually, I don’t really have any concept, either, because I was so young and still focused on the family, not the outer world.)

Oh, yes, there’s still prejudice. There’s still racism. But it wasn’t that long ago that "separate but equal" was codified in U.S. laws, that whites marrying blacks was illegal in many states, that desegregating busing led to the need to call out the National Guard to escort little children to school doors in the face of adult hatred. It was only 40 years ago that James Earl Ray shot the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. out of fear and hatred, fear of a man who said, "I dream that my children will be judged by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin."

But today…today we have a black man running for President of the United States, with polls showing him ahead of a white male Republican opponent.

In the name of love, let us all move forward.

(Gah.  My apologies to those who see this in their RSS feeds multiple times–I’m trying to center the videos, and it keeps messing up.  So I give up.)

We’ve all encountered those questions.  They’re in the pseudo-IQ-tests you can find online; they’re definitely in my dotter’s homework now and then.  You’re supposed to look at a group of items and find the one that "doesn’t fit".

So, with that in mind, here are real headlines from MSNBC’s Business section today.  That’s one day.  I’m not going to link them all, just send you to the Business main page:

"Automakers see sales fall during March" - GM sales down 19% year-over-year, Ford down 14%, Toyota down 10%, Nissan and Honda sales down, too.

"Truckers protest high fuel prices" - Remember the song "Convoy"?  (Yes, I’m dating myself here, that’s a big 10-4!)  NJ truckers formed a convoy to protest high diesel prices.  Diesel is going for $3.99 per gallon at our local gas stations.

"European banks see $23 billion subprime hit" - UBS Bank (Switzerland) expects $19 billion in write-downs, Deutsche Bank to write-down an additional $4 billion.  Since January 2007, banks have seen write-downs or credit losses off $232 billion; that’s a lot!

"Construction spending falls again in Feb." - Residential construction spending has dropped for 24 months straight.  Recent news indicates that commercial construction spending is starting to turn down, too.

"Manufacturing activity contracted in March" - An index of manufacturer economic activity was at 46.5 for March (above 50 means growth, below 50 means no growth).

"Just how bad can the economy get?" - Worried readers ask questions of the business desk folk at MSNBC.  The response?  "First off, we have yet to see confirmation that the economy has entered even a mild recession, let alone a severe downturn."

"Auto industry workers face hard choices" - Chrysler, GM, and Ford have recently announced cutbacks and closures.  How is this affecting auto industry workers?

"Food price hikes changing eating habits" - The average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32% over the past three years.  Eggs have gone up 50% over the past year.  People are making fewer trips to the stores, eating out less, cutting coupons more.

"New home sales fall to a 13-year low in Feb." - Sales dropped to an annual rate of 590,000 units, with inventory of new houses at the highest level in 26 years.

"Some homes worth less than their pipes" - People are breaking into empty foreclosed houses to rip out the copper plumbing and electric wiring.  The headline, of course, is a bit off; they’re talking houses in some really really rundown areas of rundown cities.

"Analysts see 200,000 banking industry layoffs" - More layoffs are inevitable, say banking industry pundits.

"Wall Street soars amid economic optimism" - "Wall Street began the second quarter with a big rally Tuesday as investors rushed back into stocks, optimistic that the worst of the credit crisis has passed and that the economy is faring better than expected. The Dow Jones industrials surged nearly 400 points, and all the major indexes were up more than 3 percent."  Another news source calls it the best first-quarter end for the DJIA since 1938.

I called the borough.  I talked to Jane, a nice lady who informed me "it happens all the time, don’t worry."

Look, okay, when I get something that has in big red letters "TAX DELINQUINCY NOTICE" and the word "foreclosure" on it, I get kind of hot and bothered.

But Jane said not to worry and to talk to my mortgage company.

Which was, of course, my next step.

I will not go off on a rant about outsourcing to India.  I will not.

Ahem.

Jarmesh was very polite.  Once we had communicated all the particulars, he said that everything would be taken care of.

So…Now that I know where the info is, I will be watching the escrow balance like a hawk.

In the end, I am left feeling very anticlimactic.  I hyperventilate and panic–the borough and the mortgage company act like it’s no big deal.  It damned well better be no big deal, is all I can say!

In the meantime, I leave you with the physics behind why peeling old wallpaper is a bitch (someone went to the trouble of a study to point out that peeling things slooooowly really helps a lot?!), and with Big Dog Beta, humanity’s answer to the Big Dog robot.

(No, not about taxes!)

Most of the time, I go through life thinking most people are pretty nice, that everyone (generally) just wants to get along, that the folks who get a kick out of hurting other people are few and far between.  That hackers are only interested in scoring, via macho skillz, or making money by scamming or thievery, but not interested in hurting other people.

Then I read something like this.

Hackers and spammers and what-not are branching out, it seems.  Not content with stealing people’s credit card numbers or identification, or posting 279 spam comments on an obscure blog per day for a week, they’ve now decided to target epilepsy patients, with something that hurts them.

An epilepsy support board was hacked by folks who put javascript in place to either display a seizure-inducing picture or redirect the post-reader to another website entirely that displayed a full-screen video of seizure-inducing patterns.

What kind of sick fucks would do something like that?!

I mean, really.  I can get "revenge".  I can get "personal animosity" aimed at one person.  I can get graffiti.  I can get theft.  But I can’t get the kind of personality that impersonally poisons an online medical support group with something that can actually physically incapacitate or hurt someone.  My considered opinion:  These are scum-sucking slimeball pigs with the morals of a hyena, like roaches of the internet, who should be squashed like the bugs they are.

Bastards.

Whenever I listen to doomsagers and get nervous, things turn out all right.  K2 and Gh1f, those practitioners of the “Dismal Profession”, told me to calm down, and things did, after all, turn out all right.

(So far…)

So I’ve been struggling with TurboTax and my file of goodies from the year.  I really wanted to have a video of Robert Cray singing the 1040 Blues.  But, alas, I can’t find it.  Let me just say “job move”, “house sale”, “one spouse working for an employer in an income tax state” and a variety of other things.  It’s getting quite complex.  Oh, we don’t owe; in fact, we’ll get lots back.  Of course, we’ll have to refund a major portion of that “lots back” back to OmegaDad’s employer, because it gave us a “withholding allowance” to cover extra taxes.

In the meantime, while I’m still waiting for the bottom to drop out of the various markets (what can I say–a doomsaging addict I am), I wanted to pass on these three items:

Texas Instruments has demonstrated a way kewl proof-of-concept neckband that will transmit unspoken words over a phone line.  They are busy working on a commercial version for use by folks with MLS; having had a coworker whose husband has had a rapid decline over the past two years in his ability to speak due to MLS, I know this one would have proven a godsend to her family.  Right now the process is veeeeery slow, but give them a few more years.

Then we have the video of BigDog, a robot designed by Boston Dynamics on a DARPA grant.  This has to be seen to be believed–it can climb rock piles, regain its balance after being bashed by a person or after slipping on ice, and is generally rather uncanny.  Though at one point, it looks like something from Mummenschanz (that’s when it looks like two men carrying a mattress and walking downhill).

Another DARPA grant was to DEKA, the company run by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.  The grant was to develop a modern, superior prosthetic arm.  I’ve seen the clips from last year, when it was early days; the IEEE came out with a video about it from a month or two ago.  They hope to have this commercially available within the year.

I love living in a time when such amazing things are happening, and when it’s easy to find news about them.

Oh, yes, and if you see a “If you love this blogger, take this survey” popping up to your left, please do take the survey…

When people are mentioning the Great Depression in mainstream articles about financial news, one tends to get a wee tad nervous.  When articles say the Fed made a move on Friday that hasn’t been since since the 1930s to bail out Bear Stearns, one tends to get a wee tad nervous.  (Interestingly, they say that, but then don’t explain exactly what the move is, how it differs from other moves the Fed has made recently, and they don’t offer the example back in the ’30s to compare to.)

Then again, I’m the one who read up on Y2K disaster scenarios and made sure OmegaDad and I had two cords of wood on hand for 1/1/00, plus a small supply of drinking water and canned food.  So I’m a Nervous Nellie in general, prone to being swept up on the tides of professional doomsagers across the internet.  That means, if I’m nervous about something, you can probably bet against it.

On the other hand, the doomsagers have been waving their hands at the housing bubble for three years now, prophesying major financial disaster once the house of cards based on outrageous mortgages and real estate prices started tumbling down.

What can one say when the Treasury of the Secretary, in one interview, says both "The financial system is more fragile than we would like right now" and "our financial institutions, our banks and investments banks are very strong".  So which is it?  Is it "strong" or is it "fragile"?  After all, on Monday, the CEO of Bear Stearns came out in an interview and said that BS was in great shape and not facing any problems.  Four days later, Bear Stearns is on the verge of bankruptcy and being bailed out by JP Morgan Stanley and the Feds.

Wasn’t Standard and Poors saying just last week that the worst of the mortgage write-downs are behind us??

Anyway, on my financial blogs, people are nervous about Monday’s market.  They are saying that a deal must be made to settle the Bear Stearns problem before the U.S. markets open.  But things have been so volatile lately, goodness only knows what will happen.

(Ahah!  Deal made, for less than half of Friday’s value of BS stocks!  Later note: Not "less than half"–$2 per share…BS stocks were at $61.85 at Wednesday’s close, $30 at Friday’s close.  Holy cow.  Talk about a fire sale…)

(Note:  I’m still thinking about the Dutch documentary on Chinese adoption.  I haven’t been able to find a transcript anywhere, or any real discussion of the actual details, and am hesitant to make any commentary unless I have real facts to base the commentary on…)

Gazing back into those misty, halcyon days of college, I dimly seem to remember something called "study groups".  At the beginning of the semester (or quarter), you’d collect names and phone numbers of other folks in your class who were interested in studying together, then you’d set a time, and someone would be tagged as the person to glom onto the first good study room or carrel at the university library.  You’d meet, everyone would have their textbooks and class notes, someone would bring noshes, and you’d spend a few hours going over the notes and exchanging answers and ideas about the homework.

"Y’know, I tried number 48, but I kept getting hung up!  Did anyone figure that problem out?!"

In my Numeric Analysis class (one of my favorites, really!), our prof gave us take-home tests for the mid-term and final.  He fully expected us to work in groups.  They were some of the hardest–and most fun–exams I had in my college experience.  Our study group met for hours in the library, in the break room in the basement of the math building, out on the lawns.  We worked hard.  We worked our butts off.  We thought deeply.  My mid-term response was 20 pages long; my final response was 30 pages.

We also had classes where it was probably assumed by the professor that we were working alone on homework and studying.  But even in those cases, hammering out the answers to more difficult problems with other students helped all of us understand the basic concepts better.  And those who got answers easily explained to those who didn’t, and gained from that aspect as well.

These days, it seems, such study groups often convene on the intertubes.  Specifically, at places such as Facebook.

One professor at Ryerson University, who apparently had a requirement that students were to work on assignments alone, discovered that a student had set up a Facebook study group for his class.  That student is facing expulsion and 147 counts of academic misconduct, one for each member of the study group.  His B grade was changed to an F by his professor after the Facebook group was discovered.

So many different ways of looking at this.

The professor didn’t want students working out answers to problems together. 

If that is the sole issue here, why weren’t all the other members of the study group equally penalized?  Why didn’t every student who was a member of the online group have his or her grades reduced/revoked?

As I understand it, each student was assigned different questions; since they were all different, was requesting help cheating?  Is the requirement to work on homework assignments alone a good requirement or a bad one?  Do students learn better by sweating through the problems on their own, or by helping each other find ways to reach the solution?

Different students respond in different ways to different approaches.  Some students do not like to work in groups at all.  Some students like to work in groups for some classes, but not others.  Some students work in groups all the time.  Some students work in groups to get off easily–but how does that help them when it’s time to take a test?  Some students who work in groups learn that they do all the work and others take the credit.  Some students learn better through reading, some through working through problems on their own, some through discussing, some through teaching others.

Questions of pedagogical approach aside, there are those who think that in this case it’s an open-and-shut case of cheating.  Others say that no-one posted specific answers to any problems and that mostly it was an ongoing session of tips and tricks on how to approach the problems. 

One blogger said that someone knowing they were getting the wrong answer indicates that they were cheating, because otherwise how would they know the answer was wrong?  Well, hell, I could always tell when I was getting the answer wrong–because nothing would check out when I worked the problem backwards.  Or else it just "felt" wrong.

I don’t know.  I think requiring college/university students to work alone on homework assignments is not the best approach; I think that by that age the student knows whether s/he wants to collaborate or work alone.  I also feel that the students who are actually getting specific answers from others without doing any of the work are cheating mostly themselves.  They’re the ones who will end up doing poorly on quizzes and tests.  They’re the ones who won’t be able to do the basic work when they get into a more advanced course.  They’re the ones who will constantly be scrambling to keep up or cover up as they move into the workforce.

What say you?

For a very spirited discussion on this subject, from both sides, check out The So-Called Facebook Scandal at A Blog Around The Clock.

Remember that:  it’s just a model.

But this is way too cool to ignore:  Researchers performing planetary formation models on the Alpha Centauri system have found that every way they’ve run their models, they show Alpha Centauri B to have planets, and many times that happens, there’s a rocky planet within the distance to make water a liquid.

In other words, the model predicts that it’s highly likely that Alpha Centauri B has a rocky, watery planet at the right distance from one or the other of the suns to support life.

Whoa.

For those who don’t know, Alpha Centauri is the nearest star to our solar system, at 4.3 light years away.  Right now, of course, we haven’t got the technology to get there in any reasonable amount of time; a light year is a helluva long way away.  But still…

Whoa.

Time to aim Hubble or some other space telescope at Alpha Centauri, and start doing some real looking.

I am just about bouncing in my seat here!

(It’s just a model.  It’s just a model.  It’s just a model…)

First off, did you know that the S&P 500 dropped 1235.05 points at one point this afternoon, hovering around 132?

Really!  Let me show you:

I saw that little lovely this afternoon while waiting for the DJIA to close, and just wanted to pass it on.  According to MSNBC’s little chart, it happened five times today!  Whoo! 

Of course, the reality, as shown by CNN, is much less exciting. 

Methinks someone has some code issues with 2/29, frankly.  Or code issues in general.  It was pretty amazing to see, though!  Even the most bearish of bears don’t think the markets will fall 99% in a day.

For those who are looking for a laugh, and a basic explanation of what’s causing the mortgage/financial mess, you need to take a look at The Subprime Primer (warning:  many F-bombs!).

For some more amusement, Our Fearless Leader saying "I don’t think we’re headed to recession."  As a few wags have put it, "He’s right!  We’re not headed to a recession–we’re in one now!"  I won’t inflict my many gloom-mongering links on you, but if you’re interested, just take a look at Calculated Risk or The Housing Bubble Blog in my blogroll to the left.

I need to add a finance or economy tag to my blog categories…

Lots of sky news lately.

First off, there was tonight’s total lunar eclipse.  Alas, we couldn’t see it, due to cloud cover.  I hope some of you did!  I was truly hoping to be able to see this one, because it was due to be total just as it rose here in Alaska.  The last time I saw a rising moon that was totally eclipsed was many years ago in Chicago, over Lake Michigan.  It was the most awe-inspiring sight:  a huge glowing red orb in the sky, quite Tolkein-esque, grim and foreboding.  It was huge, of course, because it was down on the horizon, and our perceptions of size are aided by local landmarks (trees, buildings, etc.); items not on the horizon don’t seem as big because there’s nothing to compare them to.

Then, there’s the U.S. planning to shoot down a defunct satellite (oops–it seems that they’ve done it tonight).  I’m not quite sure why our gummint has decided to do this, when we’ve had satellites merrily downing themselves for years now, though they played up the "1,000 gallons of hydrazine (EEEK!  Deadly chemical!)" aspect quite a bit.  OmegaDad’s theory is that the U.S. is doing it because China shot one of their own down a year or two ago, and we have to show them that we, too, can do fancy space shooting.  Sort of a cold, cold, cold war, being done in secret out in the open.

Then there’s the fireball seen over much of the northwestern U.S. Tuesday morning, estimated to be centered over Adams County, Washington, with various videos that captured it (wow!).  Reports on this meteor came from Idaho and Nevada, too, so it was quite a spectacular one.  You must watch those videos; in the second link, go halfway through and that’s when they show some more videos of the fireball.

Last of all, there’s news of a star that has a planetary system that’s practically a clone of ours, at least in galactic terms.

All very cool, to a geeky gal like me!

I thought, also, of titling this one, "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round…", hoping to pass that hideous earworm on to my faithful readers.  But then I realized that would be cruel, and besides I had already given this post a title.  And then I realized that I could do both.  Bwahahaha!

Life has changed greatly in the past two and a half years.  Two and a half years ago, after a years’ worth of cruising my local real estate market and doing up a spreadsheet that showed the average asking price and average per-square-foot for houses in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, I googled "housing bubble" and found housing bubble blogs galore.  What a relief!  It wasn’t just me who was thinking that things were totally cockeyed in the world of real estate!

At the time, I thought many of the prognostications on the bubble blogs were a bit out of whack.  Commenters were gleefully anticipating the housing crash, and crowing that it would spread throughout the economy, ushering in a recession at the least and a depression at the worst.  I would raise a skeptical eyebrow as I read those particular prophecies.

In the meantime, it’s been like watching a movie when you’ve already read the book.  Everything–every damned thing–that those bubble bloggers and their commenters had laid out as the expected playing out of the bubble bursting has come to pass.  It’s pretty eerie.  What’s also eerie is that…well…the comments were full of common sense, and one kept wondering just why the mainstream media kept playing up the drumbeat of "it’s a whole new world out there!  Housing prices will never go down!"  The majority of economists cited by the MSM seemed equally purblind.

So I watched with amazement as the housing boom came to a screeching halt, and then as sales and prices started plummeting around the country.

One of the things that the bubble bloggers were talking about, way back when, was the coming tide of foreclosures.  They talked about "jingle mail"–where buyers who were negative on their mortgages and suddenly slammed with higher rates on their ARMs, would decide to just mail the keys to the house back to the lender, rather than fight against foreclosure.  And they said the immense number of foreclosures would bring the housing market down ever further, even quicker.

Well.  Let’s look at some things:

• 77% of the houses sold in Stockton, CA, in January were foreclosure sales (okay, in re-reading the story, it’s not clear whether that 77% is of all houses sold in Stockton, or of the houses sold by one particular broker).  In the Sacramento, CA, area there were 1,815 homes sold in January, but almost as many–1,782–foreclosures were recorded in that area in the same month.  Sit back and think about that–it’s just astonishing.
• Realtors are offering "foreclosure tour" buses, where the real estate salesperson grabs a list of foreclosing houses off the database, rents a bus, fills it with people who want to buy, and just spends a day shepherding these people from house to house, vacant, empty, owned by the bank.  The bank which is desperately trying to forestall further bleeding from the money accounts, and offering what seem to be bargain-basement prices.  Of course, some of these houses are going to be in dreadful neighborhoods, and some of the amazing deals will turn out to be money pits.  But there they are:  Pismo Beach, CA…Stockton, CA…San Jose…Las Vegas…Palm Beach, FL…Phoenix…Orlando…Michigan.
• Of course, someone has decided to cash in on the foreclosure business by offering a "how to put on a foreclosure bus tour!" seminar.  A few years ago, it was "how to make money fast, fast, fast by flipping real estate!"
• RealtyTrac claimed that there were 2,203,295 foreclosure filings across the country last year, on 1,285,873 properties, with more than 1% of all households across the country in foreclosure.  This was up 75% from the year before.  (Why are there more filings than properties?  I’d guess either some folks managed to close the door on the foreclosure wolf, or else some folks had more than one filing put on their property–people with multiple mortgages, perhaps.) 
• And homeless people have started moving into foreclosed houses as squatters.

The bubble blogs claimed that mortgage brokerage companies would start going out of business…and, sure enough, at the start of 2007 they started being able to track the bankruptcies.

But now it’s spreading.  The way that mortgages got purchased, chopped up, and resold as "investment vehicles", it turns out that a wide variety of financial investment companies find themselves holding the bag on loans going belly up.  The media has been playing up the "subprime mortgage" as the main culprit–mortgages handed out to poor credit risks.  But reports lately have shown that the same problems are showing up in the "more prime" mortgages as well…because what was risky was not just handing out money to people who could show they were breathing, but the fact that adjustable rate mortgages were the name of the game, people were mortgaging up to 100% of their new property, and people were taking out home equity lines of credit on their properties’ perceived value.  Now that housing prices are dropping, you’ve got ordinary everyday "good credit risks" who have discovered that their various mortgages and HELOCs have interest rates going up and they suddenly can’t pay what they were able to pay previously.

You’ve got real estate sales people who were making six figures two years ago who have had to quit the real estate business and get jobs.  You’ve got homebuilding companies that are either suddenly holding huge "sales" or else simply vanishing, even in Small Mountain University Town.  Even the companies that insure the financial investment companies against housing market losses are suddenly tottering.  Mortgage companies, trying to contact the mortgagees who flinch away from the phone ringing these days, are disguising their pleas to please pay up as wedding invitations (yes!).

And two years ago…two years ago, people were standing in line when new home communities opened their sales office doors, with prices ratcheting up $25,000 within a day as the hordes swept in.

What a difference two years makes.

Or should I?

Last Wednesday, two cables that provide a large part of the internet pipeline for the Middle East and Asia were cut in the Mediterranean, resulting in huge internet outages for India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.  The initial assumption was that it was some ships in stormy seas tossing out their anchors, with the anchors getting snagged in the cables and cutting them.  But people checked log books and shipping records, and found no ships in the area at the time.  (At least, on record.)

Then, on Friday, a third cable was cut off the coast of Dubai.

Then, on Sunday, yet another cable, linking the U.A.E. to Qatar, went down.  (Not sure if it was cut or just gave a last gasp under the re-routed load.)

Now.  I am quite aware that humans find patterns in natural coincidences all the time.  I am also (unfortunately) quite aware that cables get cut all the time–people doing construction forget to have utilities staked before they dig, and in areas such as Small Mountain University Town, where there is one main cable connecting the entire town to the rest of the world, such a lapse in judgment can cause a mountain of heartache for the folks who live and work there.  Anyway, all it takes, usually, is a bit of forgetfulness on the part of a human, or an Act of Gawd such as an earthquake or ice storm, to cause pieces of the world to drop off the ‘net temporarily.

And then there’s the fact that the media will become "interested" (obsessed?) with a particular issue, and suddenly news of that particular issue pops up with distressing frequency.

But really.  Four cables cut or breaking right around the Middle East, all within days?!  It seems to be stretching the concept of coincidence.

Of course, tinfoil hattiness is breaking out all over.  Two ideas previal:  It’s Israel, or it’s the U.S. preparing to attack Iran.

My personal (not-so-serious) take, a hat-toss into the tinfoil ring:  It’s an attempt by multiple governments to disrupt world markets so that the almost-inevitable market meltdown hits roadblocks and slows down, rather than crashing a la Black Tuesday–the start of the Depression.  Given the way the markets follow each other and provide positive and negative feedback loops, and given the nicely conspiratorial nature of the idea of Big Banks and gummints joining forces in a panic move to Stop The Madness!, this one really appeals to me.

Another spiffy idea:  Since India is hit hard by this outage, and the U.S. outsources so much technical stuff to India, it’s an attempt by Our Enemies to disrupt our technical base.

Seriously, though:  Something like this is enough to set the least sensitive of antennae to twitching.

In other world news, China is suffering from its coldest winter in a century.  Particularly hard hit are the southern areas, which are simply not accustomed to cold and snow.  Half The Sky is in contact with orphanages across China, and some of the orphanages are having very serious difficulties; you might want to check into HTS’s journal to see what the current status is and maybe contribute to their Little Mouse Emergency Fund.

Speaking of cold, it was -26F this morning.

A few years ago, OmegaDad purchased a book called (I think) "Dinosaur Hunters", an in-depth retelling of the story of the feud between Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh, two paleontologists who set the standard for dinosaur fossil hunters in the 1800s.

For those who think that scientists are cold, aloof, logical, precise, and passionless, the story of these two would be an eye-opener.  We’re talking claim-jumping.  Races to publish data.  Vituperation and personal attacks galore.  Weapons drawn.  Dashes to be the first to dig in a promising new place.  Fights over who got to name what, whose reputation would be solidified down the centuries as The Premier Dinosaur Discoverer.  Nasty letters to the editor back and forth.  A feud played out in the public eye.

(Of course, as a person who grew up with scientists and scientifically-minded folk, I’m quite aware that the stereotype in the paragraph above just doesn’t cut it.)

One of my current regular blog-stops is ScienceBlogs.  You get it all there–climatology, biology, physics, computer science, zoology, oceanography, medicine, pharmacology–you name it, it’s there.  Along with lots of lively writers who are passionate about their fields.

This week, in the rotating blog headline spots, there was something about "armadillodiles".  I wasn’t interested, so skipped over it.

Then there was a rotating headline about Aetosaurs and Whistle-Blowing–The Saga Continues.  Well!  "Whistle blowing"?!  I had to dip in.

Dipping in led to this further article from a year ago. 

It turns out that there has been a controversy brewing in the U.S. paleontological world, starting small a few years ago, and growing.  The story, in a nutshell, is that the paleontologist who is in charge of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and is one of the editors of its journal, seems to have "jumped the gun" a number of times, citing other people’s work, work that was "in progress", taking the credit himself for the conclusions, and grabbing at chances to name specific fossil branches himself.  This includes claims that he cribbed info from unpublished masters’ theses, used information garnered from visits to other museums that were working on soon-to-be-published research, skipping over the peer-review process, and pretty much ran rampant over lots of younger paleontologists’ research.

This had been bubbling up in the professional email list for paleontologists.  It led to a variety of posts similar to the second one I linked (you need to read the comments, too!).  And then, the reason for the first post cited:  Nature Magazine, the stuffy crown prince of the natural sciences, has just published an article about the controversy.

A certain amount of stuff got posted afterwards, with titles such as Paleontologists Behaving Badly, Something’s Fishy About These Armadillodiles, Who’s Scooping Whom and Why This Matters, and Way to Represent Your Professional Community, Dude!

The entire affair seems redolent of the Cope/Marsh wars, an interesting perspective on scientific clashes, and also an interesting perspective in how Things Have Changed.  Once upon a time, the natural history world was filled with adventurers pushing each other out of the way, racing to be The First…enough so that "Around The World In 80 Days" is couched in those terms, a daring duel between scientific adventurers and scoundrels.

There you have it:  Dinosaur Wars, which I thought were a thing of the past, still exist.  The ethical scientists get creamed by a modern-day throwback.  Passions flare.  And it’s all about science!!!

Here’s an awesome post at Good Math, Bad Math about some of the thinking in the banking business that led to the growth of subprime loans, the housing boom, and the current housing bust.

Gotta love ScienceBlogs…

I found it first on Twice the Rice.  Then PAGent posted about it.  Then Figlet.

The gist:  a diplomat and his wife, while living in Korea, adopt a 4-month-old little girl (and choose, of all stereotypical names, "Jade" for her name).  When the girl is 3, they move to Hong Kong.  At that point, they have two biological children.  At age 7, they decide to abandon their child to the social welfare system in Hong Kong, apparently citing "culture shock" or "inability to integrate into our lifestyle" or "problem with our foods" or "inability to integrate into our family", depending on which story you read.  Oh, yes, and then there’s the fact that she hasn’t been made a citizen of the diplomat’s country, or of Hong Kong, so she’s still a Korean citizen–but she doesn’t speak Korean–but she’ll probably have to go back to Korea in order to be legally adopted out again.

Dudes, OmegaDotter is almost six.

I simply cannot imagine taking her by the hand, taking her to Catholic Social Services or the county borough welfare system, and saying, "Eh…she’s too much for us.  She doesn’t like to eat the same things we do.  And, geez, she still won’t sleep in her own bedroom, and does the Foot Thing, and bashes against us as a sign of love, and we can’t take it any more.  Find her another home."

I find myself desperately hoping that there’s more to this story, that this couple aren’t as clueless and obnoxious as it seems.  That the child was threatening their smaller children.  That she had RAD and this is the end of a years-long struggle.  Or something.  That the "she doesn’t fit into their lifestyle" commentary was made by a grumpy social worker without a clue, rather than coming from the mouths of the adoptive parents.

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One of the staples of a certain subset of science fiction stories is the Singularity (sometimes called the “TechnoRaputure”)–the point at which technological change, married to computers, starts coming so quickly and heavily and becomes so very intertwined with our lives and consciousness that it’s almost impossible for people before the Singularity to comprehend what it’s like living after the Singularity.

One aspect is to be so interconnected with computers–using, say, brain-computer interfaces–that humanity is enhanced by the computer use to being almost super-human.

Be that as it may…it’s an interesting concept. 

Right now, we already have plenty of people whose short-term memory is fading because it’s not in use anymore–they use the computer to store that information, and leave their brains free from that clutter.  (Think speed-dialing, email programs that store people’s email addresses so you don’t have to remember them, calendaring programs to keep important dates handy.)  This is all done with computers being “outside” us.

What will it be like when the computer is more of an extension of ourselves than an outside appliance?

So I keep looking at news stories about human-computer interfaces with a certain amount of interest.  OmegaDad and I, for instance, really, really want the RetinaCam, an always online camera embedded in your eye that you can turn on in the blink of an instant, so that all those wonderful pictures that you never get, you can now get.  (Get it?)

They don’t have the RetinaCam yet.  But a company called “Eye-Fi” recently came out with a wi-fi-enabled digital camera chip.  This is way kewl.

Then there’s the recent news of the guy who has been paralyzed for years, unable to speak.  Boston University researchers, working with guys from a company called Neural Signals, Inc., have been working with Eric Ramsay on translating the signals in his brain into real speech.  Right now, they think they have gotten to the point where they recognize 80% of the signals in his speech centers, and they hope to hook this information into a computer speech synthesis program soon.  This is amazing.

More on the brain-computer interface front:  a research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has come up with a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI)–a helmet type doodad that records brain signals–that allows someone to control a Second Life avatar.  Just by thinking about moving forward, you get your SL avatar to move forward.  Think about turning it one way or the other, and it moves that way.  Whoa.

Much to my dismay, I’m unable to find any references to the next item, which makes me think I’m searching on the wrong terms.  I know it was on ScienceBlogs recently, but not within the past week or two.  This makes it hard to locate, sigh.  Anyway, there was a music concert where the instruments or the music (can’t remember which) was controlled by the audience’s brainwaves.  I think.  Agh!  I should have bookmarked it when I first saw it!  Anyway, that was another way kewl approach to computer-human interfaces.

Tomorrow:  Linky Love; Monday:  Prostheses galore!

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

I grew up with Daylight Savings Time.  It was just another one of those things that marked the turning of the seasons.  I was just used to it, like all the rest of the folks around the U.S. who live with it.  I never questioned it, either, just going with the flow.  I thought everyone in the U.S. did it, so it was no big deal.

(A lemming.  I think that was what I was in a previous lifetime.  A lemming.)

Then a buddy of mine–one of those people whose lives are filled with drama, and it turns out that the drama is self-manufactured–moved to Indiana near the border with Michigan.  Indiana (or the area of Indiana she lived in) was Daylight-Savings-Time-free; her job, however, happened to be in Michigan, which was not DSTF, so she had the delight of dealing with two separate timezones for her life.  Of course, this provided additional fodder for her ongoing lifetime drama.  Anyway, this was all very new to me…a place without DST?

Let’s not discuss how I managed to grow up within 20-30 miles of Indiana and never knew that the state didn’t observe DST.  Life in a big city can be very parochial at times.

Skip forward a few years, to when the Omegas moved to Arizona.

Arizona is also a DST-free zone.  Most of it–the Navajo Indian Reservation uses DST, so you can drive through AZ on one time, drive through the reservation on another time, drive through northern AZ back on the first time, and then out into Utah or Nevada and back into DST.

We had to keep a mental note of whether we were ahead of our friends and family in different states, or at the same time, or behind.  OmegaDad’s cute little mnemonic trick was “In the summer, you go to the beach; in the winter, you go to the mountains”.  Thus, in the summer, we’d be the same time as California; in the winter, we’d be the same time as Colorado.

We grew quite accustomed to not having to fiddle with the clocks or resetting our internal body clocks.  OmegaDotter has never had to deal with it.

So now we’ve moved to Alaska, and back into the land of Daylight Savings Time.  Leaving aside the question of why AK bothers to use Daylight Savings Time, and the highly politicized answers and discussions attached to that, there we are, having changed the clocks last week.

This week has been horrid.  The dotter, tired enough in the middle of the week already, was practically falling asleep in her ballet class on Wednesday, and did fall asleep one minute after leaving.  Worse yet is the fact that the dotter is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

Let me just repeat that:  she is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

My response, in one word:  Grrrr.

In other news:  Let’s talk about really sucky people, to wit, a pair of young women (19 and 20 years old) who held up a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters at gunpoint and demanded their candy, shooting into the air above their heads.  That sucks.  Not only does it suck, but it’s stupid–after all, there are plenty of folks (like the Omegas) who will gladly hand out Halloween candy to anyone who knocks at the door if they’re in costume.  Not only is it stupid and sucky in that manner, it’s really stupid in general–because the police, contacted by the alert 10-year-olds who memorized the license plate of their truck, searched their homes and found (a) a trick-or-treat bag with the name of one of the victims on it, and (b) $100,000 worth of other stolen goods, thus breaking up a local crime spree that they had been working on for months.

That must have been one terrible Jones for Halloween candy those young women had, is all I can say.

Santa Ana winds.  Huge wildfires.

I’ve said this before:  Having lived in California, I can say that the thing that scared me most was the autumn fire season.  Not earthquakes.  Earthquakes are a now and again thing.  Fires are a sure thing, every autumn, before the winter rains begin.

Cousin and family were evacuated from Ramona, and everyone in the family is okay, so far.

My thoughts go out to everyone in the San Diego area.  I remember the Oakland Firestorm, and how it affected everyone in the area–everyone knew someone who had lost a home in that fire.  This one sounds like it’s going to be quite similar.

Today’s saddest Google hit on my blog:

How can I refinance when my house has lost so much value?

That one simple question has so much backstory, and that story is being repeated over and over and over again across the country.

Anyway, son, my answer is:  Don’t ask me.  Don’t ask blogs.  Don’t ask Google.  Ask a mortgage company.  Ask a consumer credit repair organization (and make sure it’s an organization, not a scam).

The housing market has well and truly tanked.  Housing sales are off by 50% year-over-year in parts of California, a drop that hasn’t been seen since they started keeping track of such things.  Foreclosures are skyrocketing.  In areas where people are stubbornly keeping to their original house price, sales are totally stagnant.  The Fed is rumored to be looking at dropping the interest rate.  A consortium of (scared witless) banks has gotten together to create a fund to save “structured inventment vehicles”, which are being hammered by the sub-prime mortgage mess.

And the DJIA, after dipping a toe into record territory, has slid backwards this week.

So, no, son, don’t ask me how to refinance now that housing prices are beginning to drop.  I’m sorry.  I have sympathy, I really do, but at the same time, I really don’t–if you’re in a mortgage mess, you need to take a lesson from this:  read your damned mortgage terms before you sign the paper.  And think looooong and hard before you agree to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars at some un-predetermined interest rate, gambling on your house’s value to keep rising.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Sorry.

Right around the same time that my female hormones really went around the bend (aka “perimenopause”), I began to have a whole slew of side effects.  Hot flashes, a hell-on-wheels hair-trigger temper, a sex drive that tanked, and memory issues.

Each of these taken separately was a total pain in the ass.  Taken as a whole, it’s a personality disaster.  But, even so, most of it is stuff you can grit your teeth and grin and bear, or take various nostrums to deal with.

One aspect, however, really, really bothers me, and that’s the memory problems.

The thing that bothers me is not the fact that I have them–everyone has memory lapses, and walking into a room and suddenly realizing you can’t remember what you went in there for was nothing new and exciting to me, just something to take in stride.

What was disturbing, however, was the form the memory problems took.

I pride myself on my vocabulary.  My ability to flit from word to word.  My personal OED sitting at my neuron-tips, just waiting for the right shading of meaning to pull the proper word out of the mental dictionary.

The form my perimenopausal memory problems took–and still take–is one where very simple words elude me.  I’ll be talking, and suddenly, instead of, say, “oven”, my mind and mouth will say, “refrigerator”.  It’s always a somewhat related word, just slightly skewed.  And worse than that are the times where I simply cannot recall the word I want to use.  At all.  I find myself saying, “the place where all the food is kept cold” and waving my hand about as if to pull the proper word out of the ether.

The thing that scares me most in terms of getting old is Alzheimer’s disease. 

No-one in my family has had it, that I know of; we’ve been remarkably lucky in that as we age, we suffer from all sorts of icky age-related diseases but still retain full mental faculties.  Diabetes?  Yup.  Cancer?  Yup.  Heart disease?  Yup.  Alzheimer’s?  Nope.

Coming from a family that is so rich in folks with excellent mental abilities and a lively love of mental games and learning and puzzles…all of those things are prized possessions to me.  The thought of losing those abilities…the thought of having to depend on someone else because I was losing my own ability to think…these thoughts scare the snot out of me.  It’s my very deepest fear.

Researchers have recently come up with 16 protein markers in the bloodstream that serve as markers for Alzheimer’s, with a 90% success rate.

Would you want to know?

I read that story and my first thought was, “Hah!  Now I can get a test and find out if my specific type of memory lapse is a symptom of Something Worse!”

Then I thought again.  Firstly, of course, is the 90% success rate, which implies a 10% failure rate.  The articles I’ve read didn’t say whether that 10% was 10% false positives (”Why, Jane!  I am so sorry that seven years ago we diagnosed you with Alzheimer’s; it turns out you’re one of the lucky folk who actually won’t get it!”) or false negatives (”George, we’re sorry, but it turns out that we were wrong; you are developing Alzheimer’s very quickly.”). 

Secondly…well, secondly.  What would you live like if you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were developing Alzheimer’s.  That even though nothing showed up currently in your personality, all the signposts were there indicating that every day, bit by bit, your brain was decaying, and after a certain point you would no longer exist as a person.  That in a few years, your loved ones would be dealing with you-as-a-burden, someone who no longer recognizes them and no longer loves them.

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I’d like to think that I’m the type to find out and face reality.  But at the same time, it’s so much easier to live with a “maybe” than with a “for sure”.

What would you do?  Would you want to know?

OmegaMom has a blank brain today, so it’s time for a bunch of quickies.

• Surely there’s more to this story than reported?  Can one be charged as a terrorist for having a copy of a book?  I shudder to think of the things in my parents’ library; dad was both into chemistry and into things that go boom as a young lad.  Dad’s pictures that alternate from a Rasputin-lookalike to an excellent facsimile of a skinhead would just make the HSA agents quiver like bloodhounds…
• An excellent description of a newly adopted child with attachment issues and how the parents coped and broke through to the child.  (Warning:  requires registration, but a very moving and well-worth-it listen.)
• A recent MSNBC front page featured two stories closely juxtaposed:  “Is Your Child Ready For a Credit Card?” and “Feeling the Middle Class Economic Crunch?”  Hm.  You don’t happen to think those two things just might possibly be related, do you??
• The dotter is being Gloria The Firehouse Dog quite often lately.  She sits and barks at the kitchen door.  OmegaDad put his foot down when she carefully brought him one of my Tevas in her mouth.
• Figlet asks “What did we do pre-Google??”  ProjectNiHao says, quite plainly, that it was a nightmare finding things pre-Google.  PNH and Theresa both have dealt with similar sock issues (Theresa had an ingenious approach of turning the socks inside out, though that would only work with non-patterned socks), and Courtney says that Laura at 11D is having the same issues with her son.  But, back to pre-Google–or, more properly, pre-Internet–times:  I read an awful lot more books then.  And went shopping.  Outside.
• We are having real homework now.  It’s no big whoop, just copying zeroes, ones, and twos, and answering questions about what to do if there’s a fire (it’s Fire Safety week).