jogged again today and PC in language is run amok

Yesterday in the middle of my jog I stopped and was doing some stretches, resting my foot on a big downed tree with my back to the trail.   I heard and saw a vehicle pull up but was ignoring it since I was not in their way.  It was a sheriff's SUV and they stopped and asked me "have you seen a person in scrubs" I replied no, and they drove on.   Of course later I was curious and was like hmm, maybe the one gal I saw cleaning up after her beagle way back by the lab was wearing scrubs, all I noticed was green pants and some kind of short sleeve white with print top.   I certainly didn't worry about whether I should have searched my memory harder for the deputy lady, I was more like "WTF,  why did they not even tell me man or woman in scrubs?"  and certainly if someone was complaining about if the dog had been off leash or something the deputy needed to mention that there was a dog.  

Today at our PItA meeting the head administrator went over the performance reviews that are looming --sort of,  they are not due for 4 months yet but they are always trying to get folks to 'summarize your activities early and give to your supervisor(s)' yada yada.  Anyway she was making the point to all the supervisors that have to write the dumb reviews that there is no need to wait until right before the HR deadline.  "you can schedule with your supervisees that you want their summary by x date and schedule the meeting for them to discuss the review at y date ...."    I guess using underlings might damage our tender widdle feelings so now there is a new PC term for the people who report to a supervisor.  

Back before Christmas a FB 'friend' was patting herself on the back,  basically calling a store cashier uncouth because when the cashier asked if she had been helped she said, 'yes, by the gal in the turquoise top' and the cashier asked her if meant the black girl.  FB friend was so proud of herself for saying 'I didn't notice if she was black, just that she was pretty.'   I did speak up there and said that since she hadn't bothered to get an actual name of the sales rep serving her lofty OC self (I left out that snark)  I didn't see why it was wrong for the cashier to ask for a better descriptive than 'wearing turquoise' to credit the right employee for the sale and asked if it would be wrong if a cashier asked "you mean the redhead?" if I had been the salesperson. 

  This gal's daughter married a black man and she adores her grandkids from that marriage so she isn't bigoted  --but in general I would think its kind of bigoted to think that noticing that someone happens to be black is somehow rude.  Seems to be me one would only think it rude to notice/mention someone's race if you thought that being black was somehow inferior, rather than just a quick IDing/sorting characteristic like:  the redhead, or my bay horse etc.  

The country seems so very newspeak these last few years although I've never actually read Orwells 1984 novel. 

I could not convince myself to ride this morning, but did jog on a work break

It was cold this morning but did not feel bad doing chores as it was sunny and no wind; but still I could not work myself up to swap chore coveralls for long johns and warm fleece riding breeches and go ride.   I have to have been sidelined with crappy weather for a week or so before I'll seize that type of morning.  I'm such a softie w/o someone or something to push me more. 

 I should have gone because I have to go in early tomorrow for the pita quarterly all staff meeting.   I've ducked the last couple because vacation, gone riding and one last winter for  bad roads so I need to suck it up and do the suck up, team player thing and come in for this one.  I just wish it wasn't conflicting with a forecast for a lovely morning.  Oh well, at least the friday and weekend forecasts did not look as bad this morning as they did back on Monday. 

It got nice this afternoon and I forced myself to go jog a bit.  I need to force myself for at least a few weeks and see if I can create a habit or at least get in a little better shape before I go back to my typical lazy ways or maybe I'll shift to more riding.   If I would waste less time on the internet I could ride enough to leg Sadie up for actual endurance and still have time to get myself some aerobic exercise.  Maybe I will pull back for a bit,  lately so much I see on the net just seems to annoy me anyway.  

Only rode 4.5 miles this morning

And yesterday I was a lazy slug and pretty much just curled up with my kindle all day.  It was cold and grey until after 2 and then the sun came out but it didn't get very warm and I didn't wrench myself out of my lazy day mode.   Oh well its OK to have days like that once in while.

It was calm and sunny this morning and felt wonderful.  L came out and we had a pretty good ride, both mares would rather have just grazed and dozed in the ditch than go for a ride but they sucked it up and did their jobs.

I started a fantasy novel in the afternoon and had the hardest time tearing myself away to make some supper and feed the horses and then later to get to bed.  That is not unusual for me, in fact it was the norm when I was younger, but when I was trying to analyze why I was so engrossed in this book I was like --- Hmmm,  other than the fantasy element of characters shifting into big cats or dragons the plot is pretty darned close to soap opera boilerplate, that shouldn't be at all hard to wait a while to find out exactly what happens.  I guess a good author can make even fairly standard, almost well worn plot device/character set-ups engrossing to me. 

  I'd love to have the talent and self-discipline to be able to write novels and especially to be able to write an entertaining tale that also made a point or two about how "conservative"  or "republican" in the sense I think of a good republic with decent laws that have supremacy over charismatic politicians/leaders that charm folks right into enslaving themselves or their children and grandchildren are great systems that allow basic decent folks to prosper.  

woot --Finally broke 5 miles this year.

Only went 6 miles but not too bad and puts the weekly mileage at 20.  Not too bad,  the weather has not been fully cooperating.   Just windy and a bit cold keeping me on the couch the days I skipped so it was not that I couldn't have gotten in the saddle; weather was just not enticing me to get out there. 

Did a fair amount of cantering on Sadie and I think she is doing very well with the heart/lungs part of conditioning.   I just need to get more miles and be committing to haul out and do some hill work soon and I think I can have a good ride season on her.

I looked at the ride schedule and decided there are only 2 rides that I would maybe want to attend but are not happening because they are on consecutive weekends w other rides I want to do so it would not make sense to try to do any kind of lease of a second competition horse.  I *may* put out some tentative feelers just for riding someone's spare horse at an event which would not be nearly the effort or commitment that conditioning and hauling the horse to rides would be but I may content with just what Sadie and I can do together and maybe try to do some fencing etc.  

Rode this morning, sigh I am out of shape

Not that I felt like a sack of taters on the horse so at least there is that but I'm dragging now at work and my arms feel sore.  The arm soreness is probably from scooping up a bit of horse poop by hand yesterday and some new stretching I'm doing but still, even as I get older I have the Garth Brooks lyric "I'm much too young to feel this dammed old" whenever I have aches and pains just from basic activities.  I'd expect them if I fell off my horse, or spent hours doing manual labor that I'm not used to, but getting them with so little cause is a sucky side effect of aging.

But at least its 14 miles so far this week.   I need to get cracking on the horse riding and I need to decide if I want to try to find a way to do more riding than what I think will be good for Sadie.  I'd like to shoot for riding quite a bit this year; but I do not want to buy another horse, its only this year that I think I might like riding more miles than I want to put on Sadie.  I can't decide whether to put out feelers to see if anyone would like to have someone do a feed lease on a horse.  I keep imagining the "are you kidding, why would I let *you* who is just a suzy slowpoke and doesn't ride that well have my horse for a season" 

  Plus not sure if I have time to leg up 2 horses before the ride season starts and normally I'm not all that keen to be hauling out to rides so often --but was talking so someone at the MRER convention a couple weeks ago and she said part of why she pushed and rode before she retired is that she didn't want to give up everything and have the military be her whole life and that resonated with me that I have been letting work and fandamily be way too much of my life and I should pursue the endurance riding like Ear Leader is going to impose a ration card for fuel and/or hay next year.  Rides I meant to do someday disappear,  I could get hurt, or laid off or any # of things so I should make a point of doing endurance while I can. 

get off my lawn --have to stop channeling my grandfather

I normally manage to feed my inner pollyanna instead but am having to figuratively sit on my hands not to channel my deceased grandfather with his zero tolerance for fools, grumpy, judgmental attitude the last couple of days with various stuff people are posting at blogs and BBs I read.   It is absolutely not my place to tsk tsk someone who last posted about oh my doc is going to get me on SSDI for back pain for pursuing weight loss surgery; I ought to applaud it as perhaps she will return to the workforce if the country ever rebounds from the Oconomy.   And so on.

 I do not know full stories on that and the other hand sitting stuff and I don't join the liberals in thinking that society should set up endless bureaucratic agencies as if people as a group are too dumb to make wise decisions for themselves but having joined a bureaucracy they will suddenly be smart enough to decide better for other folks w/o having to live with consequences of their decisions.  And I do think that mentally judging people is a start down the slippery slope to thinking society, or I suppose liberals think it would be some smarter, better slice of society needs to take charge because 'see how dumb, greedy, selfish .... whatever people are?'. 

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I did some horse pen cleaning on my long weekend.  Should have done more but on Sat. the tractor had a flat tire which I did not notice until I had gone 'geesh I can't get around in the wet sand, I give up'  Sunday I didn't feel like messing with it.   Monday L came out about 11:15 and we rode and then I got out the tractor and  had just done a little bit of cleand and the fuel filter and line clogged and I had to get dad to fix it,  I didn't know if it was a bit of water in the fuel or what was going on.  He blew the dirt or whatever  blocking the fuel line back into the tank to get it going and had A spare fuel filter for the tractor so after he got it running again and I was doing some more cleaning when it hesitated just a bit at one point I got nervous and cut the project short.   Plus I was tired of messing with it and wanted to just go have a beer.   So that may tipped my mood into grumpy cynical mode a bit. 

Today dad had someone out to get some information from them about installing solar panels.  Sighhhh,  it may be a good thing to do if all the tax credits and PUC rebates etc apply.  I just hate that the decision is not a straight "is this a cost effective way to generate electricity" but comes down to "well how much boon-doggle cash are the fed and state governments handing out for folks to install solar?,  BUT if the gub'mints are going to throw out that money we may as well pick it up instead of leaving it on the ground for the next person. 

Nice ride today

Only went about 4.1 miles but it was fun.   Ole enjoyed it too.  I was about too warm at the start, even though I left my windbreaker off and just had the heavy sweatshirt.  I wouldn't have needed my silkies under my jeans today.   Should have had them, or even warmer long johns yesterday.  I went for a short ride with just jeans, had my down coat on top over just a t-shirt and a silk balaclava under my helmet and was chilly from my legs getting cold, cut the ride to barely 2 miles.

Today before I rode I cleaned out the gutter on our horse shed.   It had not had a noticeable overflow until our last snow, the melt was overflowing the gutter and making slick frozen puddle right where I walk to get hay.   So today things were thawed enough I was able to scoop the leaves and gunk out of the gutter. 

ach, what a workday.

Must qualify because I enjoyed my morning.  Its back to nice temps and melting the snow and I had a lovely, albeit only 2 miles long ride on ms Sadie.

Then got another email nudge about two sites that have been missing in my recent ground processing and found that I had messed up my scripts to fetch them after various cpu failures in preceeding weeks.  Ooops, but at least I got that straightened out.

On to debugging some new stuff I'm working on for the satellite processing group.   I didn't get any bugs tracked down and fixed -- what I did find was that our monitoring web page is all out of whack.  Of course I noticed this after the webmaster had left for the day.   Its still basically BS but it can just stay that way until the regulars get in tomorrow morning.

Then I found that one site of a set of internet streaming data that I was getting that is supposed to be from a site near Guam, (cue the congressman Hank Johnson jokes about tipping over :P ) is actually data from a site in Canada.

 I am amazed that the processing software has been functioning at all.   I get data from the actual Canada site as well as from this *should be near Guam site but is sending out the Canadian site data or something*  and the software really dislikes having zero length baselines.   Somehow it must have been tossing either the actual or fake site and carrying on most of the time. 

 I went through a bit of panic that I was mixing data when I decimated from 1hz to 30 second sampling, but that is just changing the order of what is observed and then that the software that is collecting the data messes it up --but I think that the group that operates the near Guam site is doing the scrambling since I am getting results that don't look like total crap from  the processing of my 100 sites, only their one site is wonky and they only *theoretically* put data from that one site into the data streaming service.  

So I sent off late evening emails basically saying "this wrong --you fix now"

Abotion ramblings

 Post on AoSHQ Margaret Campbell (liberal dem columnist I guess) writing in support of Wendy Davis but is opposed to no limits abortions --does not approve of Wendy's fillibuster that temporarily halted Texas passing a law to ban abortions past 20 weeks and to make abortion clinics meet the same standards as general medical clinics.  I wrote up a long post on my thoughts and hit the banned IP.  I have floating IP#s at home and at least one of the #s in my pool is banned as spam bot or something.  So since I can't post there and be ignored I'll post here and be unread :P
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If we could turn Alinsky back on the Dems it would be good. eg.  They say they are about protecting poor and minorities -- so why do they oppose making abortion clinics meet general clinical standards?   Is that not unfair to poor urban minorities who cannot afford to go to a regular hospital for an abortion? Do they want those poor women exposed to extra dangers that rich folks never need to think about?!  Why that is very KKK like attitude is it not?   --remind folks that the KKK was a Dem party invention.  

Also we should force them to explain why abortion needs to exist past 20 weeks except for medical exceptions such as mother just got diagnosed with cancer and needs to start chemo.  How is this ever a good choice for the mother?  In fact why do we not adhere to European standards on this? - which I believe is 16 weeks for their more liberal countries.   We (GOP or conservatives) are too often (like always) lured into debates on what level of limits there should be --and I for one do not believe that the  "I think life begins at conception"  tack is correct and I certainly don't think it will ever win minds from the 'moderates'   instead  we should be making THE DEMS explain why ie European
level limits should not be considered the civilized standard.    IMO we need to win that battle.

 Well IMO there is some point (absolute minimum for me would be day after pill when you know the condom broke or equivalent but unless I were convinced it would be more like the 6 week period whre RU-486 will work) where abortion  IS just an individual moral choice and having laws to ban it would be as bad as saying everyone had to go to a state sponsored church weekly.

  But also IMO,  not having ANY limits, and a woman can go and abort at 8 months in Albuquerque is like saying "well If you don't approve of murder just don't commit one"   We should make Dem's explain why its OK for a mother to murder an 8 month old fetus that would survive without even needing much  medical care.  In fact if that is OK do they really even care if mothers smother their weeks old infants?   How can they manage to parse that?    We need to make the Dem. radicals  answer that question instead of having to say "Oh we as a group don't ever intend to let any fanatics outlaw B/C pills, or even 'day after' contraception."   Every conservative candidate asked about abortion should say "I think we should emulate Europe (or pick A European country) and I'd like to know why my opponents do not agree that this is a civilized compromise between a mother's privacy and a nations' duty to protect innocent life."   Then if they are pro-life they can say "but on a personal level I would beg my daughter to preserve life and choose adoption if she were pregnant and did not feel like she was ready to become a parent" 

Too cold to ride, just lots of reading

My internet at home has been down so I've been reading novels instead of just killing time reading blogs.   Theoretically the blogs are not just time eaters but a source of real time information but I feel like reading a novel is better mental stimulation.  Sometimes I only think "that is dumb" at the ideas or sci-fi world the author is creating but usually they are good for generating at least some musing on how people generally react and what kind of world would lead the highest # of people to live well.

Historical fiction and some really well written actual history are really fun though.  I'm reading Colossus by David Blixt right now.  I know just enough smattering of Roman history to find all the mentions of Nero, Agrippana, Vespasian quite compelling and there is a parallel story, which is minor right now of early Christianity.    I'm about 1/2 way through and will have to buy the companion novel.   I may buy some of his medieval European novels too.  

Sunday I read Fireblood by Jeff Wheeler and a romantic love tale set in 1500s Scotland by Kathleen Morgan.  I don't read a lot of romances but once in a while it is fun to read one just for fluffy reading entertainment.   I liked Morgan's tale well enough to buy another of her books; it is supposed to get about freezing this weekend but I think I'll only want to be outside for a few hours and I'm enjoying the break from the internet. 

I also read Raiders by Ross Kemp.  Recounts several Kommando raids by the Brits in WW2.   The accounts were riveting; I was hoping Kemp was very prolific and covered lots of military history but alas, he has another novel about the Brits in WW2 and that seems to be it.  I guess his writing about the Raiders is so compelling because he is very enthusiastic about that subject and researched enough to be able to fill in lots of real details about what they did down to heroic bits by actual individual soldiers. 

Reading about the level of debauchery in Rome put in place by Nero and how he was so jealous of his best generals that he made them fall on their swords --eeek, so reminds me of current times, but at least our generals are only asked to resign.   But none dare rebuke Caesar Nero and he surrounds himself by crowds that applaud anything he does, while he enacts gross parodies of normal customs of the time.  Except that no one is literally asked to fall on their sword and we have not gotten to quite that level of degradation it is eerily reminiscent of what we have today.   That has probably been a common worry across history, but studying history and thinking about how great empires failed is so discouraged by our educators today, sigh.