Laying People Off

The president of Georgia Perimeter College sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff last week regretfully announcing that the Continuing Education and Corporate Education division of the college would be closed and staff of that division laid off. More lay-offs will surely come, especially if Governor Perdue's task force, "Tough Choices or Tough Times," has its way in merging community colleges with technical colleges, a move that would surely cut many positions in community colleges as well as have other detrimental effects. (Ridiculously, Georgia Perimeter College, with its enrollment of 23,000 students, would be absorbed by a technical college such as Dekalb Tech, with its 4,000 students.)

Blogging on Huffington Post, Nanette Lepore, fashion designer, tearfully dismisses her staff as she cuts back on her business and regrets so blindly enjoying the high life during the boom times: "Why did it come to this? Where were our leaders? Why weren't enough people questioning this falsely inflated boom? Why did we all decide luxury was an entitlement?" Well, Nanette, while I appreciate your sympathy for the young staff members you wish you could keep, many of us don't live in luxury; nor do we think luxury is an entitlement. We just want to have meaningful work, to make enough money to support our families and to put our kids through college, and to enjoy the fruits of our labor in retirement. Now, according to the Georgia Department of Labor, Georgia's unemployment rate is 9.3%. I suspect it will get worse.

The Church Channel

Tom is determined to get us off cable and onto free TeeVee. Several months ago he subscribed to Netflix for me, and for the past few weeks he has been trying to set up the equipment for accessing digital television sans cable. Like freedom (as they say), TeeVee ain't free; Tom has already spent $150 on a signal booster, a large antenna, and various tools to install the antenna. And the PBS channels still pixilize ever so often. So we haven't cut the cable yet. However, I've been surfing free TeeVee just to see what's available for us here in the huge metropolis of Atlanta: not much, folks. We receive the basic three networks, FOX, three or four variations of PBS, two or three Spanish language channels, the CW (apparently meant to appeal to women 18 years old to 34 years old), and several "Christian" channels.

And thus I discovered The Church Channel. My sixteen-year-old daughter was in the room while I listened to a little of the "news" on this channel, but she couldn't stand more than about five minutes of it. First she complained; then she left the room. A blond-haired, breathy-voiced woman was reading the headlines (cut out of a newspaper and enlarged for the screen) and then asking an older man named Jack what he thought of each headline. A couple of the headlines were about Gaza and Israel. One headline stated that some EU official blamed Palestinians for the Israeli attack on Gaza; another headline claimed that Jimmy Carter believed the Israelis were responsible. "Who do you agree with, Jack?" the breathy-voiced woman said, after reading the headlines slowly, carefully, as if she expected her viewers to be third-graders. "Well, I agree with the EU official," Jack (unsurprisingly) said. He quoted some verse in the Bible about Israel being God's country or something. And then ended with a praise the Lord and support Israel. A headline about the serious problems with drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals elicited from Jack a long recitation of "plagues" and the observation that such epidemics should make us happy that Jesus is coming soon.

That was it. Every headline was directed toward some version of the "End Times" or some simple-minded support of Israel. Now, there is equally vacuous material on secular television channels, but as a once firm (but evidently not firm enough) believer, I am more disgusted with the pablum on television that passes as Christian. Jeez.....what a long way from St. Augustine to the Church Channel.

Just Here.....

Today, after days of steady rain, the sun is shining, and my spirits lift with the light that filters through the closed blinds here in my study. However, here I am, inside, instead of enjoying the spring sunshine. Perhaps in a few minutes, I will venture outside to plant more seeds in our Victory Garden. But for now, I'm just enjoying the peace and quiet in my study, surrounded by books and the detritus of all my craft projects and ideas. Here is a photo of the latest wool squares I have embellished for my kids' quilts, which I am creating out of second-hand wool sweaters and whatever other material I have around the house. (I have, however, purchased new embroidery thread.)I draw the designs and cut the material, using the patterns I've created from my designs. Sometimes I search the Internet for images that will help me come up with a simple pattern. My search today (Google image search: "chickens") led me to the blog of an artist in North Carolina: Color Sweet Tooth. And that led me to the blog of the artist's wife: Moomin Light. I have no idea who these people are besides the representations on their blogs, but I enjoyed reading some of the posts and will return to read more. Sometimes I feel closer to the strangers whose writings I read late at night than to people I've known for years. And yet these bloggers still are strangers, for they don't know the voyeur who peeks into their lives through hypertext-created windows. Here we are. As close as the click of a mouse, as far as the ends of the earth. All at the same time. Here and there. Yet nowhere. Strange.

Anyway, in one post, the artist--his name is Steve--took photos of his bookshelves, and I was inspired to take a few photos of my bookshelves, as well as photos of other items in my space. I'm not sure what they reveal about me. Here are some of them.


This is, of course, just a very small portion of all the books I have stacked on shelves here in my study and in other bookshelves throughout the house. When we moved from Texas to Georgia in 2007, I sorted our books, sold a lot of them, gave what I couldn't sell to Goodwill, but I think I could have been a lot more ruthless in culling our library. I have a fantasy of getting rid of all the books I own except those that I really love, that I plan to read again or that I imagine will comfort me in old age--with their narratives or language or with the memories their words evoke. Just enough books for one or two shelves.

Occasionally I entertain myself with imagining just what books I would choose, a version of that old game, "If you were exiled to some desert island, what books would you choose to carry with you...." The novels of Barbara Pym would be on that list, for I can read those novels over and over again. And a novel or two, at least, by Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen. Poets? Of the Romantics, I would choose William Wordsworth over Walt Whitman, the American poet Margaret Gibson over any number of contemporary poets, and a collection of Japanese haiku masters for my last breaths. The letters of Vincent Van Gogh and a book of his art. The poems of Emily Dickinson. Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Other Travel Sketches, not just for the poet's language but also for the journey which the poet took late in life and for the memories this book will always recall for me: I was reading it on my second visit to northern Minnesota, in January, at the home of a good friend, when I was young and thought love would always be enough, would always be here, at hand, in the presence of friends, in the middle of shared adventure.

Freedom

Today the sun was shining brightly, and when M-M's cat Odyssey managed to get out of the house and into the front yard, we decided to let her enjoy a little freedom. However, give a cat an inch and, yeah, she'll take everything you've got!

We try to keep our cats in the house or in our backyard. This is usually not difficult to do with the two female cats. Pluto, our male cat, however, somehow manages to get past the chicken wire we've stapled to the top of the backyard fence. Today, however, Pluto was in a fey mood. Tom has been working on the roof, installing an antenna (preparing to ditch cable and return to free, but digital, airwaves), and has also been going in and out of the attic. While the attic ladder was down, Pluto raced up into the attic, where he has been hiding all day, probably asleep in some corner. This would not be a problem except that he won't come down by himself. He will prowl around the attic opening, but he's spooked by what he must perceive as a death-defying drop from ceiling to floor. I will have to get him down, eventually, and he will be clawing all the way.

Odyssey, however, was ready to brave the streets of the neighborhood.Oh, wow! While I was typing this post, Pluto sprang up onto my desk. He managed to get down the attic ladder by himself. I could have saved myself some scratch marks the three previous times he hid out up there!

Victory Garden, Phase 2

Last week I amended the Georgia clay in our Victory Garden with compost that the county creates from lawn waste. This week we have been planting herbs and vegetables we purchased at local nurseries and hardware stores. And I am waiting for a seed order so that I can begin sowing Rustic Arugula, Thai and scented basils, cilantro, Asian lettuce (baby leaf mix), nasturtiums, and zinnias. The basils should be sown when the ground is warm; I have sown basil too early in the past, and the seed doesn't germinate well when the soil is still cool. Meanwhile, plants from last year are leafing out and poking through the soil of my herb garden near the front door. A couple of months ago I found some souvenir wooden shoes at Goodwill. Tom drilled a hole in the bottom of each shoe for drainage, and I planted what looks like a kind of stonecrop in each shoe. (The plants had reseeded from a plant I gave my mother when we moved from Texas; I dug up the tiny plants near my mother's front porch.) Near the shoes are growing several thymes I purchased last year and planted.

M-M has been setting stepping stones through the Victory Garden as a short-cut to her strawberry plants, which are bedded on the south side of the house.

The lemon balm in a corner near our front steps is a healthy, brilliant green.

Yesterday Tom and I set out some tomato plants. We were disappointed to discover that all of the nurseries we visited yesterday sold the same kinds of plants, from the same sources. We did purchase five plants, one of them an heirloom tomato. We were hoping to find some interesting cherry tomatoes and peppers besides bells and jalapenos. Tom wants some yellow habanero peppers; since he's going to Austin in a week or so, he may buy some pepper plants in Texas and pack them in wet newspaper for the journey back to Georgia. Although we should have begun earlier, we are going to attempt to sprout some heirloom tomato seeds and pepper seeds. Friday evening, Tom and I walked a little over a mile to the local community garden and purchased some flat-leaf parsley plants and some kind of Asian green. I'll post more photos of the Victory and herb gardens as our plants grow.

There I am--on my spring break over a week ago, amending the soil with compost. And here is a photo of some of the herbs before I planted them.

Trees full of Birds

On the first day of spring, Tom and I sat in our backyard looking up into the branches of trees arching far above us. The trees were full of birds. Two red-bellied woodpeckers danced around the trunk of the sweetgum tree. They circled the trunk again and again, one leading the way, bobbing its head, the other following. Last year we enjoyed the red-headed woodpecker that nested in a hole high above our neighbor's yard; we saw one there yesterday, as well. Robins hunted for insects in the front lawns, and bluebirds flew from yard to yard looking for a nesting place. Cedar waxwings have been migrating through here, too, remaining in the tops of trees; their high-pitched trill, however, gives them away. I always hear cedar waxwings long before I see them. They are a sleek, pretty crested bird with a black mask and yellow-tipped tail. I've heard their high-pitched buzz in Waverly Hall, Georgia, and in Central Texas, where they descend in flocks to feast on juniper berries.

Later that evening, while M-M was entertaining friends in the house, Tom and I ate dinner on the patio in the waning light. I lit candles around the table, and we sat in the dark drinking wine and eating pan-seared salmon, beets, red potatoes, and stir-fried bok-choy and beet greens. Across the suburban lawns, probably near the creek where we had heard it earlier and closer, a barred owl hooted. How I love to hear that call here in our 1940s metro-Atlanta suburb. That call carries me back to so many places, but most memorably to Old River, Texas, where I lived as a child, where six generations of Dugats had lived. Woods surrounded our home of eight acres, and owls hooted often, calling across woods in which my father had hunted as a young man.

Sometimes late at night, really in the early morning, while everyone in our house is asleep but me, that owl, or one like it, calls loudly in the trees near our yard. I open our front door and step outside. The street is dimly lit by street lights; the houses are dark. I wait, hoping for one last call. It's how I imagine myself at the end of my life--waiting, listening for that last call, the hoot of a barred owl or the tremolo of a screech owl, maybe the haunting call of a loon--some bird calling me in the waning light to whatever is beyond this flesh.

But now the birds are calling us into another spring. Some cultures celebrate their new year in the vernal (or March) equinox, "Nowruz" in the Afghan and Iranian calendars. (This week, one of my colleagues, originally from Iran, brought traditional Iranian sweets to work for us to share.) Makes sense. To a new leaf, a new beginning.

Me, Too

Updated Links Below

The AIG bonuses are outrageous, but I agree with Kevin Drum, especially with the passage that I've underlined:

I don't, frankly, care all that much about the AIG bonuses. The only reason AIG isn't in Chapter 11 is technical (they're too big to fail!), so morally I don't see any reason not to treat them as if they were in Chapter 11 like any other failed company. That means employees stand in line for their bonuses along with all the other creditors. On the other hand, this whole thing really is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, and Tim Geithner and the United States Congress have better things to worry about.

But the culture that brought this on? That deserves to be dismantled brick by brick. I may not care much about AIG, but if it's the spark that finally gets Americans to take the executive comensation racket seriously, then hallelujah. If it's not, then it's just a carnival sideshow. "Bonus Babies," posted March 19, 2009, Mother Jones.

Update: See, here are what people smarter than I are saying--and I agree:

Matthew Yglesias' post, "Should We Fear an Exodus of the Talented from Insolvent Financial Firms," posted Friday, March 20, 2009.

Kevin Drum's post, "Indispensable?," posted Thursday, March 19, 2009.

Weirdly Wonderful

Just browsing on the Internet today, I came across some weirdly wonderful stuff. Here you can see furniture made of old automobile hoods: Joel Hester's work at The Weldhouse (in Mesquite, Texas). And here you can see hotel rooms made of wine casks: De Vrouwe van Stavoren, Hotel-Restaurant-Serre (in the Netherlands). Here is a house built with grain silos: Monte-Silo House.

Making Progress

Several months ago, I began a project in tandem with my best friend: creating things out of discarded wool sweaters. We had learned that one could "felt" wool sweaters purposely--as opposed to doing so inadvertently by tossing one's best wool sweater in the wash!--and then cut the sweaters up for craft material. I purchased many wool sweaters at a local Goodwill store, washed them in my washing machine (placing each sweater separately in a pillowcase), and then dried the sweaters on a low setting. Then I cut up each sweater and stored the material in copy paper boxes I bring home from work. Then I began my work.

I first made a jacket, a vest and a cell phone holder. The jacket and vest were each made from a single wool pullover, cut open up the front, hemmed, and embellished with crochet, embroidery, and appliqué. The smaller jacket fits my daughter but not her style; I made the red vest for my mother. The small jacket I made rather quickly, the very first thing I made using sweater-felting, as one can see in the hastily stitched hem. But after these small projects, I decided to tackle something much larger, a quilt for each of my two children.

Here's the idea I came up with to make the felted quilt project more portable. I cut felted sweaters into 7-inch squares. Then I cut squares out of cotton material a little larger than seven inches. The cotton material is from handmade clothes and scraps I have collected and saved over the years. If I liked a piece of material, I kept it, storing it in a large plastic zipper bag with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the front and back. I hem each wool square, embellish it with embroidery, buttons, appliqué, or designs cut from other material. Then I handsew a square of cotton backing to the completed wool square. When I finish making 160 such squares--80 squares for each quilt--I will use yarn to sew a blanket stitch around each square and then crochet the squares together. I am a little over one-fourth the way through with this project. I decided to make the quilts at the same time rather than trying to complete one quilt before starting on another.

Here is a picture of the squares I have completed. Though the picture indicates almost enough squares for one quilt, these squares are for two quilts. I have a lot more squares to make. Although I embellish most of the squares, I am also making squares with no embellishments because I think the quilt might be a little too overpowering if every square had buttons and bows. The striped squares in this photo are unembellished. All of this is hand-sewn. And while the work may look tedious, it does not seem to be so to me. I find the work engaging yet relaxing. Engaging because I create a design for each type of sweater-square. I look at the square and decide what I am going to create on that square. Can I draw a design that will look good appliquéd? Will I appliqué a flower, a whale? Will I sew interesting buttons on the square? What color of embroidery thread will I use? Although some of the squares have turned out less successful than others, I will include them all--they tell the story of my creation, of my increasing confidence with the work and of my developing expertise with the material. And of my love for hand-crafted items and for my children. Every stitch is a conscious, deliberate stitch, in the moment--and for that reason, the work is relaxing.

The Real Scandal

I've not written a lot about the economy and the bailouts of financial institutions mainly because others have posted much more lucidly than I could on the economy. The financial failures and bailouts are so complicated, such a mess, that it's all rather mind-boggling to me. However, I did learn quite a lot by reading an article that I think Steve Benen linked to on his Washington Monthly blog. Because I didn't have time when I first saw the link, and because I really don't like reading long articles online, I printed the article and read it a couple of days later. Then I recommended it to Tom and Mary-Margaret. Not only does the article explain the craziness of the world market before everything crashed--as illustrated by financial behavior in Iceland--it's also an eye-opener about gender roles in Iceland. And, despite its depressing story, financial disaster, it's rather entertaining, too. See it here: Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra," Vanity Fair, April 2009.

Less entertaining, but to the point, is Robert Reich's post on The Huffington Post: "The Real Scandal of AIG," posted March 15th. Online news sources and blogs have been headlining the latest scandal at AIG, the over $165 million bonuses the bailed-out institution (which received over $170 billion in taxpayer money) is paying executives, with most of that money going to the Financial Products Unit that was instrumental in causing the company's huge losses. Here's the last paragraph in Reich's post :

Apart from AIG's sophistry [the company's argument that it is legally bound to pay the bonuses and that it must also do so to retain "talent"--the very "talent" that caused the company's problems] is a much larger point. This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. So to whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.

Oh, and I have also followed the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer/CNBC tempest. We usually watch Jon Stewart the evening after the original broadcast. (I'm the only one who is willing to stay up to 11 p.m. on weeknights, so we catch the re-broadcast at 9 p.m. the following evening.) I knew Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer had hit the bigtime when the Lehrer News Hour covered the story in one of its 10-minute segments.

Update, 7:30 a.m. March 16th: Make those bonuses $450 million! And here is another reaction to the bonuses at AIG: "More on Bonuses at AIG," posted by Hilzoy at Washington Monthly.

The American Craft Council Show

Yesterday a friend and I drove to Cobb County, just north of Atlanta, to check out The American Craft Council Show. I love to view art and craft creations, and I like to buy handmade items, too, when I have the money. I especially enjoy seeing contemporary work, while the artist is still working, trying to get the attention of the world while expressing some inner vision. Museums are fine, but they represent a small portion of the history of artistic creation, venerating the artists who--by luck, by reputation, by personal connections, and/or by talent--have been selected by some authority to communicate "true" art and craft to the rest of us.

The crafts on display at the Cobb Galleria on Saturday were really fine, in execution as well as in price. Of course, Cobb County is one of the top 100 richest counties in the United States, so the audience for the merchandise were those who could afford a $500 jacket or a $3,575 handcrafted, wooden bed. Not that I abhor spending that kind of money for a well-crafted item; I would just have to save for the rare purchase! Really, the stuff was gorgeous. In the end, I purchased a handmade, leather back-pack purse for my daughter--too expensive for someone like me who now works part-time in education--and a pair of handmade wooden tongs for my husband, who likes well-made kitchen items. Here are the websites of some of the crafters whose business cards I took home:

• Spoonwood, Inc., Jonathan's Wild Cherry Spoons: This booth was crowded with shoppers. The merchandise was plentiful, practical, and reasonably priced. You weren't getting "one of kind" if you purchased an item (for the crafter made several copies of each piece), but you had the satisfaction of getting something handmade and useful, something that would make spending time in the kitchen just a little more fun.
• GreatBags, Maple Leather Company: The source of my daughter's nice, new, leather backpack purse (very soft and supple)
• James R. Wilbat Glass: Cool glass-blown art--the booth at Cobb Galleria mainly contained examples of the artist's sculptures.
• Tiffany Ownbey, Papier Mache Sculpture: funky papier mache sculpture--I have to admit, while I loved the fiber wear and furniture, priced for the person who can indulge more regularly than I in extravagances, my eyes were drawn to the less functional and more funky artwork.
• The Metal Quilt: Metal collage by Kim Eubank and Will Armstrong, in Richmond,Virginia. Hey, I just love collage art, all media, all forms! And I wondered if Will Armstrong could be a distance relative of Tom's; Tom's great-grandfather Baker White Armstrong was from Richmond, and William is a common name in the family.
• Suwanee Clayworks Studio: This studio is located in Suwanee, Georgia, so I think I may visit the gallery sometime. The artists have scheduled a gallery sale in December. I have taken several pottery classes, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I love handmade ceramics. I especially liked the "watering cans" on display in Mark Knott's booth at Cobb Galleria.
• Suzanne and Matthew Crane, Fine Furniture and Stoneware: Look at the installations on this website. Yeah, I want a work like that in my bathroom, too!
• G. Kenner & Co., Fine Furniture: And I want to sleep on one of these beds!
• Ira and Sue Lances, Handmade Chenille: I wanted to purchase one of Sue Lance's handsewn scarfs ($100), and might have, had I returned to the booth before leaving the Galleria. I had a chance to talk with Sue, who explained some of her process in creating the chenille jackets and in creating the scarves. What really impressed me was that she uses the scraps left over from the jackets to create these lovely open-network scarves.
• Mary Darwall, Mais Oui Designs: The intricacy of these beaded jewelry pieces was incredible.

After perusing every booth at the exhibit, we headed back to Decatur and lunch at Carpe Diem. Spending an afternoon with someone besides family and old friends reminded me of how much time I've spent alone these past few years since I left full-time work. My socializing tends to be planned weeks in advance: the occasional dinner party or meeting with new friends for events in downtown Decatur or the long-distance trips to visit old and valued friends in other states. Rarely do I do anything with someone on the spur of the moment. It's really interesting how much socializing is connected with one's work.

Quiverfull of Kids

Hot on the heels of that news item about the Muslim man aspiring to father 100 children is this story in Salon about the Quiverfull movement: "All God's Children," by Kathryn Joyce. This is a fundamentalist Christian movement that encourages women to have as many children as they can, with little regard to the effects such prolific child-bearing might have on the women. Joyce also refers to a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention who claims that married couples who choose not to have children are going against God's will:

the Rev. Albert Mohler, Theological Seminary president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, argued, for example, that deliberate childlessness was "moral rebellion" against God.

Rev. Mohler has two children, so I guess he doesn't think doing God's will means having a quiverfull of kids; perhaps just one kid meets the reverend's religious standards for married life.

I continue to encounter reminders that support the reasons I left the Southern Baptist church, the Christian denomination in which I was reared. And examples of how wacky religion can be.

An Education in one Land's End Order

For years I have purchased Land's End products, and although the quality of those products seemed to diminish even before Sears purchased the company, I continued to buy certain items, especially the interlock cardigans and turtleneck and mock-turtleneck sweaters. The clothes were reasonably priced and adequate to my casual lifestyle. Also, I just dislike spending time driving to and from--and spending time wandering in and out of--clothing shops. I just don't much like shopping. So I tend to buy my clothes online: Land's End when I'm looking for something reasonably priced and Marketplace India to accessorize those boring Land's End products.

And because I like to buy products on sale, I often purchase items at the end of a season for the next year. In spring, I may buy a pair of boots. In the fall, I may order a couple of pairs of shorts and t-shirts. So last week, I sent in a large order--for me--to Land's End (and, near the same time, to Marketplace India--I also tend to buy a lot of needed items at one time, thus reducing the amount of time I spend on online shopping!) What an eye-opener when I began unpacking my new clothes and removing the plastic packaging from each item. Every item seemed to have originated in a different country. Here's the list: Hong Kong, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, and Q.I.Z. Jordan. Good God! It boggles the mind to think that one of my turtlenecks originated in an Asian country and that another was imported from Central America.

And what the heck is Q.I.Z. Jordan? I discovered that Q.I.Z. is the acronymn for "Qualifying Industrial Zones." According to Wikipedia, qualifying industrial zones are

industrial parks that house manufacturing operations in Jordan and Egypt. They are a special free trade zones established in collaboration with Israel to take advantage of the free trade agreements between the United States and Israel. Under the trade agreements with Jordan as laid down by the United States, goods produced in QIZ-notified areas can directly access US markets without tariff or quota restrictions, subject to certain conditions. To qualify, goods produced in these zones must contain a small portion of Israeli input. In addition, a minimum 35% value to the goods must be added to the finished product.

According to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Congress authorized QIZ in 1996, amending the "United State-Israel Free Trade Area Implementation Act of 1985 with the goal of promoting peace, development, and trade between Israel and the surrounding countries, namely Egypt, since it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979."

According to CorpWatch, an activist organization, in 2003, most of the workers in the QIZ factories were women who made a minimum wage of about $3.50 a day (while at least one of those factories made a profit of over 2 million dollars a years). Well, no wonder my turtlenecks are so damn cheap.

Spring

Spring has not officially arrived, but the weather this week has been very spring-like, more like central Texas than north-central Georgia, with temperatures in the high-70s and low-80s. I'm on spring break, a week's vacation from tutoring part-time, and have spent the first part of the week gardening. So I'm especially attuned to the natural world this week and to all that we do to make it conform to our needs and expectations.

Having this extra time at home has provided me with more opportunities to pay attention to nature in a suburban setting. One morning, I spied a hawk swooping out of the sky to perch on a neighbor's metal fence. It sat there, looking into the shady backyard where a small dog lives, but swiveled its head to watch me warily as I approached from across the street. This hawk must have a nest nearby, for I saw it again a couple of days later, flying up from a perch in another neighbor's yard to circle and drift above the sweetgum and black locust. In fact, this is probably the hawk I've written about previously, the one my daughter observed catching a small mammal.

Yesterday while I was turning over the soil in our garden to mix in the compost, one neighbor who has a home childcare business came across the street with the entire troop, about six young children. They were on a short expedition to look for signs of spring. I was part of the afternoon's exhibit, an example of spring: someone preparing a garden. My neighbor asked the children to guess what I might be planting; most of them guessed daffodils. That is, one boy answered "daffodils," and every child after him gave the same answer. I told them that, yes, I was planting flowers (not daffodils--those will be planted this fall if I prepare the ground in time), herbs, and vegetables.

Earlier today, I spied violets blooming in our backyard, a sure sign of spring to me and a remembrance. Images of violets always bring to my mind a particular place and a certain feeling. The place is my best friend's former home, located in Denham Springs, Louisiana. Chris's shady yard was always covered with violets in the spring; I had never seen so many violets in one place, unexpected jewels on a carpet of pine needles. I will always associate violets with the early days of our friendship, with the excitement that accompanies every new relationship: the joy of discovering a kindred spirit, the exultant hope of future shared experiences. Somewhere, probably in a journal I kept at the time, there is a recipe for Chris's violet jelly. Now Chris (Christine) lives far away from Louisiana, in northern California, a home I have yet to visit. But this memory and its attendant emotions--faded but still felt in the very core of my being--remind me of the promise of every spring, of every friendship, of every distant but unforgotten love.

Texas Justice II

Scott Horton, international law and human rights lawyer who blogs for Harper's has a recent post in which he notes the heavily Republican-weighted federal judiciary. Of the 678 judges, he writes, about two-thirds of them are Republican, and two-thirds of those Republican judges were appointed by George W. Bush. These appointed judges tend to be the most politically ideological. Horton highlights one particular judge from Texas, Sharon Keller, "the senior judge of the state’s court of criminal appeals." Keller was elected when George Bush was elected, and she has proven to be extremely conservative, a "hanging judge." Most troubling is her handling of the case of a mentally retarded man incarcerated for rape and murder. Even though recent DNA tests indicated that the semen in the victim was not Roy Criner's, Keller refused to allow the man a new trial. However, public outrage over her judgment was so wide-spread that President Bush pardoned Criner. Now Keller is being investigated for other abusive conduct.

As Horton points out, it's unusual for federal judges to be held accountable in such ethical breaches. Recently, the Supreme Court deliberated on a case that focused on campaign contributions and the impartiality of judges: Should judges step aside from a case when it involves a supporter who contributed large amounts of money to that judge's campaign? The case involves a judge in West Virginia who received a contribution of $3 million from a supporter who was later a party in a lawsuit over which the judge presided.

According to a study by political scientists Chris Bonneau of the University of Pittsburgh and Damon Cann of Utah State University, "campaign contributions appear to affect the outcome of cases in states where judges are elected in partisan contests." Which states did the professors study? Michigan and......Texas. Because the study focuses only on these two states, the study is small, but Cann and Bonneau are planning a larger study that will draw information from ten states.

Just something to think about........

Quote for the Day: Healthcare and Farmers

Reading an article that Tom sent me and that I linked to two posts below, I came across an interesting quote. The article is about sustainable farming, the hard truths of trying to farm organically and the collective will needed to amend our farming practices. Here's the quote:

If we're going to ask the market to pull in a new direction, we'll need to give it new rules and incentives. That means our broader food standards, but it also means money—a massive increase in food research. (Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.) And, yes, it means more farm subsidies: The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we're going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model. For example, one reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance. Thus, the simplest way to encourage sustainable farming might be offering a subsidy for affordable health care. [my emphasis]

Barack Obama has it right: everything comes back to health care. Solve the health insurance problem in this country, and other problems will be on the way to being solved, or at least one big hurdle to solutions will be removed.

Source: Paul Roberts, "Spoiled: Organic and Local is so 2008," Mother Jones, March/April 2009. www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008

Overpopulation? Several news items

This morning I watched a little bit of Good Morning America, which included a story about a man in Dubai who is aspiring to father 100 children. Of course, he has had more than one wife, seventeen, in fact. So far, the man has fathered 86 children, with two more on the way. He is a very religious Muslim and believes that in having a large family, he is doing God's will.

Later, I ran across an article about the effects of population explosion on the planet, which reminded me of a conversation I had with Tom this weekend as we were gardening. While we support organic gardening and local farmers, we realize that modern farming practices have made it much, much easier to feed the planet's population. I remember when population control was in the news in the late 1960s and early 1970s; people thought the burgeoning population would lead to apocalyptic crises. Well, those crises haven't occurred in wealthy countries such as the United States, but it's debatable whether or not other less wealthy parts of the world suffer from population growth. It's true that modern farm practices certainly enable us to feed more people than one could have once imagined.

Of course, there are problems with too many people on the planet. People gobble up natural habitat in their search for food and shelter--understandable, for one wants to live and to support one's family. But other species become extinct, fuel consumption goes up, millions of acres of land are denuded of trees, and greenhouse gases affect the health of the planet. I am certainly not for coercive population control, but I do think we each have individual responsibilities to make the world a better place. I'm not sure that having oodles of children is a way to do that. (Cue here the story of the mother who recently gave birth to octuplets.)While one man's goal to father 100 children isn't going to tip the balance, there would be a problem if many men sought to father 100 children, a problem not just for the planet but for women, too!

If such fecundity is God's will, perhaps he'll provide us with ways to deal with the consequences. And--just in time--NASA is launching the Kepler satellite, which will spend over three years looking for other planets that can support life. Our life, that is, human life. Other earths just waiting to satiate our ravenous appetites. Hmmmmm.......

Arugula: Greens of the Gods

Some years ago, long before some idiots labeled people who ate arugula as elitists, I purchased some arugula seed from a seed catalog. I grew my arugula and was delighted with its spicy taste. In Texas, I grew a "rustic" strain of arugula; its flowers were yellow, its leaves slenderer, and its growing habit invasive. I purchased a different strain of arugula last spring; the leaves are just as tasty, but the flowers are white, and its growth is not invasive. I'll be trying out some new strains this spring. As my arugula grows, I'll harvest its leaves, enjoying at least the food of an elitist, if not the lifestyle. What crazy times we live in: our economy goes south; the American taxpayer bails out rich folks and the companies they plundered. People like Darrel Dochow, who made $230,000 a year as a government regulator (and who was "also the regulator in 1989 who oversaw the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan"), is accused of helping a bank falsify its records and yet gets to retire from his government job. He's probably receiving a government pension, too. Yet I, who brought home a laughably low paycheck as an educator, am elitist because I eat arugula. Go figure.

Arugula, greens of the gods. Poster plant for the Greene Victory Garden 2009.

Update: Tom just sent me an article that reminds us that while "our industrial food system is rotten to the core...heirloom arugula won't save us." But on a smaller, personal scale, homegrown arugula can certainly spice up our salads.

More on Taxing the Rich

A picture is worth a thousand words and a graph maybe just as much. Steve Benen posts a graph that illustrates how Obama's "taxing the rich" plan compares with tax rates under previous presidents. You won't see this graph on Fox News because it takes the steam out of the hysteria of the right. See it here: "Soaking the Rich (Redux)" and its original post here: "The Thin Line Between Socialism and Capitalist Nirvana." And for more comparisons, read Hilzoy's comments here: "Be Like Reagan and Thatcher! Soak the Rich!"

Victory Garden, Phase 1

During WWII, not only Americans, but people in Great Britain and Canada aided the war effort by growing vegetable gardens in their front yards. These gardens were called Victory Gardens. In some areas of the country, such gardens have been gaining in popularity again. Some folks want to eat as much food grown locally as they possibly can because they're concerned about the amount of resources, such as fuel, that we waste on transporting fruits and vegetables over vast distances. Restaurants in our own area advertise the fact that they use locally-grown food whenever possible. Some folks just hate the waste of time, effort, and money poured into maintaining a perfect front lawn of grass; others just love homegrown tomatoes. Now that the economy is tanking, more people are looking for ways to save money and have turned to growing their own food.

I grew up in the country, in Chambers County, Texas, and my father always had a garden. I hoed weeds, picked peas, and snacked on crisp raw vegetables straight from the plant. When my husband and I were young married students at Texas A&M University, we gardened on land that the university tilled and allotted for married students living in cheap campus apartments. I've had a garden everywhere I've lived, growing flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Now I live in a suburban neighborhood of houses built in the 1940s. For the most part, our yards are small and our backyards are shady. But I've been planning a Victory Garden in our sunny front yard. Last year, we took out the boxwoods next to the house and re-planted with flowers and herbs, built a homemade trellis, and installed a garden bench. This year, we're expanding. Tom is even going to try to grow purple okra on the south side of the house.

Our biggest problem will be watering our garden. The Atlanta area has been in a drought for the past two to three years. We put in one water barrel at a downspout behind the house and plan to put in a couple more at downspouts on the north and south sides of the house. We hope we will be able to collect enough water to keep our plants alive should the drought continue.

This weekend we began phase 1 of our twenty-first century Victory Garden: turning the soil over, pulling out grass, and incorporating compost. I'll post occasionally on our progress. The arugula I planted last fall, by the way, lived through the winter and is now flowering. Soon it will go to seed and create a new batch of arugula. According to some idiots, arugula is the food of elites. I just call it a green--and our poster plant for the Greenes' Victory Garden.

And now for some silliness

Oddbox, at BBC Radio Newsbeat online, introduces ten silly clips for viewers to watch. Notice how many of these stories are from the United States!

And here's the Joke of the Day, from Comedy Central.

While we're still with pee jokes, here's a Carol Lay comic on Salon (apologies to Joyce Kilmer).

Is it Fun Being a Billionnaire?

On March 2-3, 2009, Fox News conducted a poll in which the following question was asked:

Do you think asking the wealthiest Americans to pay more in taxes is a good idea because it levels the economic and social playing field, or a bad idea because it punishes hard work and success? SCALE: 1. Good idea because it levels the playing field 2. Bad idea because it punishes hard work and success 3. (Don't know)

Of course, anyone who knows anything about language will realize that the question is biased by its word choice. Who besides the envious and insane would want to punish hard work and success? However, as has amply been illustrated in the past few months, wealth is not necessarily the result of hard work. Take all of those CEOs who received incredibly huge compensation packets from their companies over the past few years, companies that are now bankrupt largely as a result of bad management decisions--companies that we, the American taxpayers, are supporting with our shift-worker salaries, our teacher salaries, our office manager salaries, our hair-dresser salaries (and so on). Those CEOs did not become wealthy through hard work. Neither did such extremely wealthy high-rollers as Bernie Madoff and "Sir" Allen Stanford.

Both men are being accused of running Ponzi schemes, of bilking billions of dollars from investors. Stanford's father established an investment firm in Mexia, Texas, and later father and son made money by buying up depressed property during the 1980s (how I remember that time, having lost money on a house, ourselves, during the oil bust of the '80s) and then re-selling the property later as the economy recovered. Robert Allen Stanford took his investment business out of the country (one can assume, to avoid taxes and oversight), and now owes millions of dollars in back taxes to the United States government as well as billions of dollars to trusting investors.

On Stanford Financial Group's website, Sir Allen attributes his wealth to hard work: "His philosophy of hard work, clear vision and value for the client remains the cornerstone of Stanford’s success today." What an ironic statement, in view of the charges held against the man today. I can't help but wonder about all those hedge-fund managers, the ones that don't have such a high profile as Bernie Madoff and Robert Allen Stanford. Does one really think "hard work" made them wealthy?

In the March 9th edition of The New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson has an article about Robert Allen Stanford, titled "Not Quite Cricket." (abstract here) The article focuses on Stanford's support of the game of cricket, particularly of the Stanford Superstars of Antigua. One passage in the article, however, really caught my attention:

We [the writer, Alec Wilkinson and Sir Allen Stanford] spoke about the elections in the United States, which were just a few days away. He was concerned that Barack Obama would raise taxes on rich people. I mentioned the name of a hedge-fund manager who had made more than a billion dollars in a year--even if he'd had to pay half of it in taxes, I said, he'd still have more than five hundred million left. Stanford studied me for a moment, as if I were an odd sort of specimen, and then replied, "I just hope they don't squeeze the life out of the last engine in the economy that's got any gas left." Stanford reportedly owes the United States slightly more than a hundred and four million dollars in back taxes. (25)

Remember this guy when someone next asks you whether the "wealthiest Americans" should be taxed more.

Here you can watch Sir Allen Stanford yukking it up with CNBC's Carl Quintanilla: "Stanford: Yeah, it's fun being a billionaire". As you watch this, remember that authorities have been suspicious of this man's enterprises for more than fifteen years. Perhaps investors wouldn't have lost money had those suspicions been pursued more diligently and had media suck-ups asked the tough questions. (Same for Madoff) And here you can watch Jon Stewart's perfect take-down of the financial acumen of CNBC: Jon Stewart, March 4, 2009.

And at CNN.com, you can read of how money buys influence and reputation: "Standard Financial: How To Buy a Reputation". Nothing new under the sun.

UPDATE, "Not one iota of evidence that starving the beast works...":
Bruce Bartlett, domestic policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a treasury official under President George H. W. Bush, writes in Forbes that the Republican claims about raising taxes have not proven to be true. See his article, "Higher Taxes: Will the Republicans Cry Wolf Again?", online, at Forbes.com, February 27, 2009. (h/t)

And for another view on taxing the rich, read Daniel Gross's article in Slate, "War on the Rich?", posted March 5, 2009. (h/t)

"Those Who Can't. . . ."

When my daughter first told me she wanted to be an English teacher, I tried to dissuade her. Don't get me wrong. I value teaching. I taught English composition, business writing, and literature for twenty-five years for various colleges and universities, from Texas to Minnesota. But I also know first-hand--and second-hand, since my sisters are teachers in public schools--that our culture does not really value teaching. Years ago, two friends of ours who had majored in computer science stopped to visit on their way to bigger and better things (they ended up working in Virginia and Washington, one with the Pentagon). I had just begun teaching full-time as an instructor at Texas A&M University; Tom was working as a researcher for the Texas Forest Service. In conversation, comparing our lives since our years together as undergraduates, we must have described our salaries. Our friends looked at us pityingly and then said, by way of comforting us, "Well, you were always good at living on little."

Years later, when my brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon, told me he paid more for malpractice insurance than I made annually, I was crushed. And that was my annual salary for full-time teaching as an assistant professor. A few years later, teaching part-time at a couple of colleges in Texas, I calculated how much I made per hour, adding the number of hours I spent not just in the classroom but grading essays, responding to e-mails from students, reading and critiquing rough drafts of students' writing, and preparing lesson plans. My hourly rate was just barely over minimum wage. Now, my sisters, who teach in public school rather than at public universities, had higher annual salaries than I did when I taught full-time at a small university in Georgia, but they also dealt with far more student-behavior issues and parent-teacher issues than I did.

Not only pay, but attitudes toward teachers suggest how little we value teaching. This past week, I was reminded of such attitudes when my daughter and I sat in her high-school counselor's office. We were there for the pre-college pep talk, to discuss my daughter's academic plans for her senior year in high school as well as her plans for college. When the counselor learned that M-M wanted to be a high-school English teacher, she grimaced and said, "Oh, I could never be a teacher. I couldn't handle all those kids. But then... well, I'm a doer."

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. This was a high school counselor giving credence to that old--faulty--adage: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

The attitude wasn't lost on my daughter, either, of course. Later I told her that the negative attitude of her counselor was one that she would encounter again and again as a teacher, especially as a secondary-school teacher.

With her grades, skills, and talents, my daughter could pursue any number of more lucrative and more valued careers. Instead, she is following in the footsteps of her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, great-aunts, and several great-great aunts: she wants to be a teacher. Over the shock, I tell her it's a fine profession. I loved teaching. But I would have loved, also, being better compensated for my efforts good work.

Value: A House of Cards

It's really depressing and infuriating to realize that the economic crisis in our country--and the rest of the world--is largely due to unregulated and greedy decisions made at the upper levels of our financial institutions. The right likes to scream that our problems are all the result of ordinary Americans buying homes they couldn't afford. Yeah, many Americans bought more than they could afford; they were sucked in by easy credit, by a culture based on consumerism, and by unscrupulous lending practices. Then their mortgages were bundled into "assets" that were sold over and over, good mortgages bundled with shaky mortgages. The financial institutions handling those mortgages didn't even know their real worth. I get the impression the value was all made up. Recent news articles suggest just this. For a good explanation of the the mess at A.I.G. (American International Group)--which, we, the taxpayers, are bailing out--read Joe Nocera's article, "Propping Up a House of Cards," New York Times, 27 February 2009.(very thankful hat tip to Steve Benen) This once triple-A rated institution is now reporting "the largest quarterly loss in history" and is "most crippled of all the nation’s wounded financial institutions."

What have we seemed to value in this country? Not real work--but the ability to "game the system" in order to line one's pockets with "lucrative fees... risk-free money." But now the system has crashed, and the CEOs of these companies--and their well-compensated underlings--now depend upon the ordinary American taxpayer to foot the bill. These were our Titans; these were our gods: the great moneymakers of Wall Street, the captains of finance. And now we have to prop them up, little stick figures, on our own little handmade altars.

More Snow Photos

Around 6:30 this evening, I convinced my daughter to help me build a snowman. Temperatures weren't high enough to keep the snow from melting, but our yard had a good inch of snow left in it. So we bundled up and went outside in the fading light. My daughter stuck with the project through getting the head on what now was a snow woman; then she went inside to complete some homework while I put the finishing touches on our creation. Our snow woman may be only a fraction of herself by tomorrow afternoon. According to weather.com, the temperature here is 38 degrees Fahrenheit, so unless those temperatures drop, our snow woman may even lose some of herself tonight. However, it was fun to play in the snow. We get so little of it here.

UPDATE: Monday, March 2nd, 19 hours later

Snow in Atlanta

Snow started falling in this town just east of Atlanta at around noon today. Four hours later, it's still falling. Our daughter is ecstatic. Our son in Austin, Texas, is jealous. We lived in northern Minnesota for 2 1/2 years, and he still misses the place. Here are a few photos we took while out on a walk around 1:30 this afternoon.