Areas of Unrest

14 January 2001 - Prairie Dogs in Space!

QOTD: "True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past." - Martin Buber, I and Thou

Reading: Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek

Listening to: Snakefarm, Songs From My Funeral

I've got to feel sorry for this poor second lieutenant on our program. Here's a guy fresh out of school, eager for a career in space. And he got saddled with dealing with an environmental problem at a site where we're building a ground station. So, instead of dealing with real space stuff, he gets to spend his time arranging to have prairie dogs relocated. It provides a certain amount of comic relief at staff meetings, when he describes how the removal services use giant vacuum trucks to suck the prairie dogs out of their holes.

This has not been a good week for Southern California. We had a major storm, for one thing. I was concerned since I had to drive out to Azusa three days in a row, but the rain was only a real problem for one short stretch on the third day. To top things off, we had a couple of earthquakes last night. Nothing major (around 4.3), but you never know that when the shaking starts.

I finished reading Bowling Alone and found it very interesting for the most part. I bought the book because I'd heard the author (Robert D. Putnam) interviewed on NPR about how people don't belong to clubs anymore. Of course, I heard the interview while I was on my way to a Bards meeting, which is not quite a club. But all of us are involved in storytelling (at a minimum) and go to a couple of meetings of some sort of another every month. Putnam has some good points to make but I think he underestimates some of the causes for the decline of social capital. For example, he minimizes the effects of the hours people work. I admit that my situation (traveling on business nearly every week) is not necessarily typical, but I know lots of other people who would be more involved in various activities if they weren't tied up with work. I was discussing our upcoming change to a compressed work week with a colleague and mentioned that one of the main reasons I'm happy about it is that it will make it more feasible for me to commit time for volunteer work.

I also have to admit that there's an inherent bias in reading this sort of work. If you're the type of person who is involved in a lot of activities, you tend to know other people who are similarly involved. It may well be true that the vast majority of people are spending most of their time sitting around watching television, but those aren't the people I am likely to meet.

Other things that happened this week include making some progress on some of the items on my life list. I registered for a book binding class at Wildfiber, bought an introductory Arabic book, and made a reservation on a Galapagos trip for December. I've also been working on shorter term goals and did a fair amount of household decluttering. I'm about midway through the annual cleanout of my desk drawer, which mostly involves transferring financial records to a file drawer. Which meant cleaning out the ten year old records in that file drawer. (I know you are only supposed to keep stuff for seven years, but the drawer holds ten years worth, so that's what I keep.) The shredder got a good workout in the process. I also filed a lot of index cards and put away all the maps and travel brochures and started going through some other papers. I have to keep reminding myself that I didn't get all this clutter overnight, so it will take time to get rid of it.

The more exciting news is that I got email from two people I hadn't heard from in ages. One was somebody I met while traveling and it hasn't really been all that long - probably a bit over a year. But the other was a friend from high school. And she lives in Los Angeles! We're working on plans to get together, probably the weekend after next. I'd more or less forgotten that I'd ever signed up with classmates.com but that's how she found me.

Shameless Self-Promotion Department: Come see the Biona Bards in "Family Matters" on February 3rd, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at Tales By the Sea. The concert is at the Malibu United Methodist Church, 31028 Morning View Drive, across from Zuma Beach. Doors open at 7 p.m.. For reservations or information, call Ann at 310-457-2385.