Editor's Choice!

I read Salon pretty often. Recently after the VT murders (which hit me really hard as you well know, I wrote a comment on an article on what English teachers ought to do about students who write disturbing stuff. Out of 122 comments, mine was chosen as one of 20 Editor's Choices. I'm tickled. Read my comment. You may need to click through a "day pass" advertisement if you don't have a Salon subscription.

New Figure Skating Feature

A while back, Blogger (which I use to manage this blog) added a labels feature. Of course, they didn't provide a way to LIST the labels for old style templates--only for the new style XML templates. That stunk.

So, being bored and grumpy tonight, I decided to write a script that would do exactly that. If you scroll down below the Skating News, previous posts and the archives in the sidebar at the right, you'll find the list of labels. They are in no particular order. Maybe someday, I'll add some sorting code. Who knows.

If you click on a particular label, you'll be taken to the page where all the posts published under that label have been aggregated. I haven't gone back and labeled every post, so there is a lot missing. Oh well. When I get time.

For now, enjoy.

Figure Skating Frozen in Time

I love YouTube. I really do. I love how you can finds all kinds of video from all kinds of time periods, from all over the world. So I am starting a little video series. From time to time, I am going to post videos of figure skaters, famous and not. Sometimes, when there's time, I'll do some commentary and other times, you'll just have to cope.

So, to kick this off, here are two very interesting videos of Dorothy Hamill. Dorothy is known for her flow, her exquisite edging, her quiet power and serenity. But this is a Dorothy of a later age. The Dorothy of 1976 was a choppy Dorothy, an athletic Dorothy, not a very graceful Dorothy--a jock. Her spins travel badly, rotate slowly, and are generally poor--except for her layback which was quite impressive and lovely. Her program was packed with footwork and action--reminded me of a CoP program in that regard--even though she never did anything more difficult than a double jump. She was dynamic--and FAST--and very enjoyable to watch. But the deep edges? The quiet flow? The serenity? M.I.A.

1976 US Nationals


Even the Dorothy of 1980 was far less of the Dorothy we have come to know, and more the jock. Her spins improved markedly, though they still travel. She still had her speed. This program is an exhibition, so it's a bit emptier, more stroking, less footwork, but all the jumps are there. There are beginnings of the smooth-as-cream stroking and the deep edges.

1980 Olympics Exhibition


Despite the jarring fall in the middle of this program, this is the Dorothy we have come to know and love. Her edges and stroking are breathtaking. She does a lovely pivot move in the program of a sort you really don't see anymore--no time for stuff like that. She had, by this time, lost many if not all of her jumps. She would later regain them. There are hints--just hints--of the athletic young girl she once was as well as the maturity of many years gone. Dorothy is a national treasure.

What a Wonderful World (1995)

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The last day... and an ob figure skating

This week has been hellish, I tell ya.

My mother is visiting this week and as my MIL says, "houseguest are like fish, they stink after 3 days." No, honestly, I love my mom, but she is tiring herself out and she really seems to resent the fact that I am working my ass off from dawn to dusk. I don't know why that is. She feels put upone because she's not allowed to bother me. Okay... she's not allowed to bother me. It's a fact.

But I shouldn't get annoyed when she calls it "guard duty" when my US Navy husband has "duty." He's not guarding anything, he's just covering the night shift this week. It's inacurate. But I shouldn't nit-pick.

Truth is, I am TIRED.

I've been busting my ass for weeks. It's allergy season. I had two week long projects this week each of which would have taken the whole work week and I had to do BOTH of them. I did, but at the cost of not being able to do much else that wasn't optional. I spent 2 days at the doctor (one for me and one for Akey). I spent 3 days working. I'm beat.

The good news--if it can be called good news--is that I finished the project for the employer which is laying me off. I've spent some time prospecting and sent some resumes. I don't see much, but I guess I can keep prospecting. I sent a couple "perfect" ones, but no response so far. I find myself more drawn to regular working job that guarantee X hours per week rather than individual articles.

I made some major headway on writing chapter 9 of Google Analytics 2.0. Jerri says that Google announced that they are beginning migrating everyone to the new version. This is great, as Google Analytics 2.0 went up on Amazon already. I've started tracking it with my booktracker. It's pretty pathetic at present. It'll improve. The current edition Amazon Rank Tracker is still doing okay.

So, last but not least, I saw this video this morning and the first thing I thought--before I saw the caption--was, "boy, this looks like modern figure skating." So, here's your video this week.



Enjoy...

And yes, they are the famous Ross Sisters singing contortionists. The video is from 1944.

The F-Word

I finally saw the pain specialist about my arthritis today. The news was not particularly good. He thinks I'm having some back problems (knew that) and that the pain in my hip might be mostly due to that. I don't agree with that, because my back is not particularly bad now, but my hip is EVIL and worse when it rains--explain to me how muscle pain gets worse when it rains?

Anyway...

He agreed with me that my PCM is a bit of a dolt (not in so many words) in that she didn't know that a negative rheumatology panel doesn't really rule out related problems. When one is in flare, the tests are positive, but when one is not in flare, you can do a zillion tests, but they won't be positive. A rheumatologist--to which my PCM refused to refer me--would have known that. So that was one of the points he left me with... that I may indeed have something RH related (or Lupus, which also hides when not in flare).

But, he went on to say the f-word. No, not that one.

Fibromyalgia.

Just what I always wanted. Something painful, progressive and incurable! Ye ha! Yeah, yeah, I know, it's treatable. You can cope with it. I don't really want to, truth be told. I am still very disgruntled about being in chronic pain. I'm not frightened, rather, I am pissed. Damn it, I want to be healthy again! I am tired of being sick and fat and achy.

The doc didn't say it WAS fibro, but he tested the pain points and they DO hurt. I think the idea is to treat it with fibro medicines and see if it responds. He gave me a scrip for a Fibro med which I forget the name of. We'll check back in 6 weeks to see if it's working. I have to take the darned stuff 3x/day. Which is going to be a trick since I can't remember to EAT 3x/day. He told me to keep taking the Celebrex, but he was able to set my mind at rest about some of the safety issues I was concerned about.

I wish I was happier about this, but I'm not. It sucks.

Smooth figure skating

It's about time for an "ob skating" post. For those of you not on SkateFans, that's an obligatory mention of figure skating in an otherwise totally off topic post. And this blog has not much been about skating lately. My bad, I've been so busy that I watched Nationals in reruns and only parts of worlds.

One thing I did catch though was the fluffy Latin on Ice. At least, I saw part of it. When Rob Thomas and Santana first did Smooth, I imagined it as an ice dance. I was livid when Kristy Y. mangled it that first season. I just wanted to shake her by her skinny little shoulders--and I LIKE Kristy's skating most of the time.

It needed someone who really understood and internalized latins. Someone who could breathe Latin. I never saw Peter Tchernyshev in the main role (though he is 101 reasons to think pervy things), mainly because I felt that he never really got Latins. Smooth is a cha-cha, a very latiny latin. Porny Peter has the great, sweeping swooshes of smooths (waltz, foxtrot, quickstep etc) down cold. His technique makes my toes curl. He also had a certain eastern European rock-and-roll sensibility about him that is far more Metallica than it is Elvis. More speed metal than rockabilly. So I never saw him doing justice to Smooth. He just doesn't get Latins. But this is actually pretty good.

Okay, who am I fooling, the main highlight of this program is that Peter does it almost shirtless. And oh, BABY, is he cut. You don't even notice that he has no Latin hip motion to speak of (something that is, granted, very hard to do on ice). When you can look away from Porny Peter, you notice that Naomi actually gets the cha at least a little bit.

Anyway, this is for a reader who never saw this particular piece of on ice fluff.

What a bad week...

This has been a crazy, stressful week (on top of about 8 crazy stressful weeks just passed). My anxiety disorder is in high gear, meaning that I'm constantly on edge and restless and worried. We've put a contract on a house that could well be overwhelming, but is what we can closest afford (or COULD have afforded). I'm deep navy blue over the shootings at Va Tech. And yesterday, to top it all off, I got a call from my most major client, the one which has, for the last few months provided 25% of our income (and the only REGULAR income I, personally, have, and about 75% of my revenue), and was laid off due to plummeting profits.

I just kind of stood there, listening to my supervisor (this was an actual part time job rather than a contract) nodding and going "uh huh" at appropriate times, trying not to freak out and cry in front of him. It seems the SEC has changed rules about how the kind of research we do has to be expensed. So instead of being paid out of commissions from the trading desk, it has to be paid for up front in "hard dollars." Real money. As a result, revenues plummeted, and people were being let go. My Red Hat project, for which I was supposed to be lead, wasn't picked up. And as a relatively new hire, I was laid off. I imagine a reporter with more seniority will take my place on my existing project.

I'm still freaking out, really. It's not that I can't replace the revenue. It's that it's damned hard to replace regular, dependable revenue that requires as little energy and brain power as this job did. Yes, I can replace the income, but at the cost of 3x the work... which I really don't have the oomph to do.

And to have it happen NOW. We're buying a more expensive house. I expect costs for our internet service to double (twice as much money for far less bandwidth, sheesh!). Our mortgage will rise by 50%. It couldn't really be much worse--I shouldn't say that, it can ALWAYS be worse. Just when things begin to go well, the sky falls. We never get ahead because through absolutely no fault of my own, bad things happen. Pardon me for whinging, but WHY, OH, WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME?!

I don't need to be depressed and de-energized this week. I have a book project that is still behind. I still have one last project for this job which I will have lost as of April 30. I have a moving to orchestrate and the last bits of paperwork for the mortgage to do. I have kids to get from one thing to another. I have laundry--that never ends.

This sucks. It just sucks.

Close to Home...

The slaying of 32 people at Virginia Tech has been all over the news the last couple of days. I was shut up in a community center in Hampton Roads, VA (the south-east corner of the state) most of the day Monday doing taxes for the AARP's TaxAide program and did not hear anything until nearly 2 PM. My response was the same as everyone else: incomprehension at the senselessness of the violence, parallels to the Texas clock tower shootings of so long ago, a sense that somewhere in Iraq LOTS of people whose names we will never know were dying in senseless violence too. That didn't change the horror that some disturbed soul could walk calmly into a university building and start shooting.

One of the victims was Lauren McCain, age 20, of Hampton, VA. Lauren worked at a pool frequented by more than a few kids from my children's school. Lauren's father works with my husband. I never knew Lauren. We never will.

Please send your prayers and good thoughts for the comfort of Lauren's family and the repose of her soul. This one hit too close to home.

45% Certifiably Crazy

So, it's been an insane spring time. My arthritis is still bad, but I finally have a medication which controls the pain (Celebrex, ie yi yi, regarding the associated risks!). I wrote a novel and a quarter. I visited San Francisco (on business) for the first time in 8 years. I am hip deep in writing the second edition of Google Analytics (officially Google Analytics 2.0).

About 2 months ago, due to several factors, we decided to move to a nearby rural area. The location of and appalling road traffic near our present house, crime and poor services in our town, an unpleasant incident at my children's private school where the principal did something very unjust to me, and a general desire to get OUT of the city and go back to being country people--it was just too much. It took me 18 years to get OUT of the country and another 18 to get back IN! So, we've been house hunting.

We are trying to move to a MUCH more expensive area, with great public schools. Our house has doubled in value in the last 4 years to about $200K, but out there, houses of this size on the kind of land we want are $300K-$350K when they are available at all. Comparably priced houses tend to be 25% smaller than the one we currently own--which is already smaller than we need. It's been tough to find houses we can afford that have at least a little land around them. We wanted 5-10 acres, but it looked like 3-5 was more do-able. So we've downscaled some.

We found one house that needed a fair amount of work, but wasn't too old. But they took another, better offer, even though we offered full price. Then we found a second house, one locally known as "The Triangle House" because it was that all-roof chalet style. It was a charming house, on about 2.6 acres of almost virgin timber (that was was one of the things I loved) and it had a garden tub with a whirlpool which was a distinct attraction for my aching joints. But it had some problems, namely the 13 deadfall or falling trees that needed removing, and the weird set up where my office would be upstairs on the second floor and my kids would congregate downstairs in the basement with a concrete slab and 2 flights of stairs (one with a very low, slanted ceiling) between us. It just didn't seem practical. Plus, there were water infiltration problems (PUDDLES! UGH!) in the basement and no idea how hard that was going to be to fix... if it could EVER be fixed so that it really never leaked.

It was not easy telling this to my husband that since he was deeply in love with the place. I tend to spoil him, letting him have what he wants. I figured i could live with it. When the seller backed out of the contract, DH was devastated. He didn't have any of my reservations about the place. He was enthusiastic about felling and splitting all those trees (and the new toys he would get to buy to do it with). He doesn't really spend a lot of time in the house, whereas I am there quite a bit of the time there. Anyway, finally, I just blurted it out, the reasons why the house made me so uneasy. It wasn't until then that he finally seemed able to let it go. It took TWO WEEKS of stress and raging for him to let go of this house that we never really had.

To his credit, I guess, I have to remind myself that over the years, while we've bought 3 houses, he's been overseas, or otherwise occupied for every single house. I've done all the hunting, all the "oh my gosh we can't afford ANYTHING," all the moping because I've looked at everything there is and there's still nothing. He hasn't really had to cope with the heartbreak of not getting the house he really loves before, while I've learned the hard way that in house-hunting you cannot afford to fall in love. You HAVE to be able to walk away from any deal. You don't "have" a house until you sign the closing papers. It's not yours. You cannot lose something that is not yours.

Anyway, we've been looking and looking, even at houses further up in the price range, up to $350. I know this seems pathetically cheap to some of you, but that is FAR more than we can afford to support. I have been house-poor and don't want to repeat the experience. But we still weren't finding anything. We found two houses on 6 acres for $350K, thinking we could get my brother to move into the small one. But the bigger house was just TOO small. Then, we found two manufactured houses--TRAILERS--on 7 acres for $300K. But trailers... we have to sell this place in 5-6 years when DH retires from the Navy and we move on. Some people (like us) are very uneasy about buying trailers, no matter how nice. We were beginning to get really bummed out about our prospects of finding a house we could afford on "some land" in the right school district.

During the course of our travels out in the county, we came upon a likely looking house. It was for sale. It was WELL within our price range. It was big enough for us. But it was under contract pending a home inspection. So we went home, feeling blue, kept looking, kept not finding anything. And Monday, we followed up with our agent about that likely looking house. Turns out, the home inspection had come through and the buyer had backed out of the deal.

We got a copy of the home inspection and found some interesting bits. The house has only one bathroom. The plumbing is part galvanized and part copper (a BIG no-no)... and part, as the inspection report says, "There are at least three repairs made to the water supply lines of the bathroom sink and toilet area, which are made with rubber hose and automotive clamps." When DH and I stopped laughing like hyenas we read the rest of the report. The house needs pretty serious work-though some has been done--and it has a BAD case of half-ass disease. Oh, and did I mention that is ONE-HUNDRED-EIGHTY years old?

That's where the 45% certifiably insane comes in.

I grew up in an an old house. half was pre-Revolutionary and the other half, pre-Civil War. I know how much work a place like this is and what a money pit it can be. It's kind of scary, because I know what I am getting into. It needs all the plumbing pipe replaced (fortunately, there is not much of it). It needs the floors jacked and supported. It needs foundation work. It needs work in the bathroom and kitchen (if not a totally new bathroom and kitchen). It needs central heat and air. It needs dampers on the FOUR fireplaces. $50K? $100K? That is the bad news.

Yes, I am panicking.

The good news is, of course, with property values being what they are, if we do the work, we can surely get the money back out when we move. DH has friends in construction who are willing to help him with the foundation work. The house is stable and livable, and actually fairly nice on the inside. Yes, it needs a kitchen and bathroom, but we can use the ones that are there for the time being. There is room for a garden and fruit trees. There are KIDS living next door. There are outbuildings for all our junk and maybe for a few animals. There is a creek (or as we say "a crick") out back! Okay, I'm excited. I am not thoroughly cynical. I've fallen for this house.

The house has a name, Carroll Plantation (est 1820), and stories and history. And I have to say, I can't wait to ferret all this out. I am considering starting a blog about the place (as if iIneed another blog to maintain) and our remodeling/restoration efforts. If and when I do, I'll let you all know the URL. In the meantime, if you ever thought I was crazy...

Now you know.