bye tacoma

we put the dogs in the kennel yesterday afternoon and the cats slept with us last night. i liked that. good cats. we got up at about 3. and we're leaving in about half an hour for seatac, for cleveland, for baltimore/washington. we'll get there at about 6 tonight, east coast time. dad's birthday is tomorrow. on sunday i'll go to church for the first time since the last time i was with my parents. i don't even know the last time kara went to church. (it's just unitarianism, not so threatening or unreasonable.) on monday we might go to baltimore or to washington, for a little daytrip. then on tuesday kara and i fly to atlanta and then back to seatac, to land close to noon, pacific time.

kara's a bit worried about the dogs, of course. the people at the kennel, though young of course, seem like they'd take good care of them. (everyone's so young these days!) we'll retrieve the dogs on tuesday afternoon. they'll be fine. they've got each other, and dags has his bear.

wish us a good trip!

fresh pic

because i know you must have sorely missed seeing them of late, here's a fresh pic each of stevie and dags, taken just 3 days ago. kara and i are flying to maryland the day after tomorrow, as it happens, to celebrate dad's birthday over a long weekend, and the dogs are going in a kennel for the very first time. we're a little nervous about that, we hope they won't wig out too much, but we've decided to let dagmar keep his bear with him, so we hope he'll be all right. (of course, the bear no longer has eyes or a nose, and he has large rents here and there, with stuffing jutting, but he's still remarkably intact.) i wish steve had a toy she liked as much, that gave her as much comfort, but she's not as materialistic as her brother.

fey

i can't help it. i love tina fey. she's just so damn cute! plus funny. and smart. i'm not at all a "saturday night live" watcher, haven't been for a few decades (though i've been known to check out "30 rock"), but i thought this was a funny bit. she does a good palin in my opinion.

lake of fire

we watched a quite long documentary yesterday called lake of fire. it's about abortion, shot in black & white. it has vivid images of abortion procedures, products of conception being suctioned from the uterus, including tiny and intact feet and hands, and not-quite-intact heads. (it's a good thing the film was in black & white, otherwise it would have been quite red.) it's about assassinations of abortion doctors, the maniacal pro-life groups. it has noam chomsky and alan dershowitz, and others, as voices (in my opinion, of course) of reason. it's about the question of when a fetus becomes a person - at conception? at one month? three months? birth? - but of course it doesn't answer the question. nor should it. it's a very evenhanded documentary, and roe, of roe v wade, is even in it, talking about how she has since changed her mind and become pro-life.

waking with cats

when i woke this morning i was lying on my back and yellow was lying on my chest. his rump was right under my chin, his back paws straddled my sternum, and his front paws were just caudad to my diaphragm. my right arm rested across my lower abdomen, my fingers almost touching my left iliac crest. and eliot lay on the bed with his back against my left hip. my left arm was at my side and his left hind leg was draped across my wrist. with my thumb and forefinger i stroked the fur on his chest and belly. the back of his head rested against my thigh.

of course i'd hauled eliot downstairs last evening, after kara had put the dogs in their crates. he's still afraid of walking past the dogs, even when they're crated. silly boy, he was trapped downstairs with us all night by his own irrational fear.

breaking silence

funny. i just haven't been interested in blogging lately. i might even give it up. i feel like nothing much is going on, though all the usual things are going on. things are good; i just don't have anything to say. i'll just say these things then:

i finished an alan hollinghurst novel called the swimming-pool library; it was sexy and well-written and a good story. in honor of the main character's sexual predilection, i submit this photo of british olympic triple-jumper phillips idowu.

the dogs got over their kennel cough and kara's taking them to the dog park this morning, but yellow's sniffly again. i listen to a lot of rufus wainwright; he makes me happy. and i think about writing but i don't write, yet. i think about exercising and i exercise a little. i mostly read and watch movies on the television, when i'm not working. work is fine.

my doctor switched me to paxil. i have social phobias. i feel fine.

bye english

we're getting, in the next month or two, new software for speech recognition. among the reasons, i believe, that our current speech recognition software isn't very good is that there has been a lack of conformity among the transcriptionists as far as formatting documents and correcting grammatical and other errors in dictation. the software can't "learn" unless it gets the same sort of input from all fronts. so, as i understand it, the policy in the early months of our use of this new software will be to generally not correct grammatical mistakes made by the software. (this could be an oversimplification, but it does seem to be the broad stroke.) there is a distinct worry among a few of us in the department that the quality of reports we produce in the near and far future will drop dramatically and painfully. at the moment i'm torn between fighting this and trying not to think about it. i worry anyway about the deterioration of the english language, what with text messages and other horrors, and this can only contribute to its downfall.

of course, we don't yet know exactly how terrible it's going to be, how restricted we will be in our powers to correct the errors the software will make (or, rather the dictators' errors the software will not correct). we soon will know, though. the good thing about this software is that it's supposed to increase productivity by 200% or more. but we'll just see what the cost will be.

anyway. the new qa position has finally been posted. i've decided not to apply for it. it's not what i want after all, after some months of mulling it all over. i've had enough of working closely with management and i'm ready to just be a worker again. i started a new piece of fiction this week, writing i mean, at long last, and this will be a focus in my life, rather than advancement up the management ladder.