Parade

We went to the Krewe of Selene parade on Friday night. I've put up a web page with some pictures.

New stuff, hiding

At the beginning of the year, I thought I might like to try out some new blogging software. I set up a blog over on Wordpress, where I blogged about Mormon stuff. I've decided that keeping two blogs is just not how I want to approach my writing. I've deleted the Wordpress blog, but I've pulled over all my posts from there (16 of them) and inserted them into this blog in proper chronological order.

These posts differ in that they are about Mormon stuff, and I've disabled comments. I don't know if I will continue writing about Mormon stuff here; I don't particular want my personal feelings and difficulties to become fodder for either pro- or anti-Mormon commentary. This stuff isn't insignificant to me.

Feel free to poke around in the January and February archives if you'd like to read what I wrote over there. But I'm not really interested in feedback.

Paul

This is Paul.



Paul sat next to me on my flight from Memphis to Gulfport. He was on his way to Killen, MS (hometown of Brett Favre) to help put a house back together. I asked what kind of shape the house was in, and he said it's gutted and ready to go down to the studs. The new wiring is in place. He'll be helping put in drywall/sheetrock and floors.

I asked Paul if these were good friends, that he was helping them rebuild their house. He said, "Well, they are now."

Paul said that after the hurricane, he felt the need to do something to help. So, he loaded up some stuff in his truck and drove down. When he got here, he was surrounded by people just like him, but who had lost everything. He stayed for a while, went back home, and then drove back again. He's reached the point where he comes down for about a week, every three or four weeks.

Paul said that he's made the trip so often, and has so much stuff here now, that he can fly instead of driving.

I teared up and snuffled a bit as Paul told me his story.

Thanks, Paul. We're glad you're here.

Old Buddies

I happened across a news story about someone I once knew from church being sent to federal prison for income tax fraud (after defrauding about 60,000 people out of their money in a pyramid scheme; nice guy). This person was barely an acquaintance. But I started googling, and found a reference or two in some of the stories to people I did know well. That led me to google for a member of their family I had considered a good friend.

Yikes. After he and his wife divorced, in a sloppy agreement in Nevada based on false representations of residence, he took the children at the beginning of what he had determined was his custody year. She was a citizen of another country, and had returned there after the divorce with the children. The incident was eventually ruled a violation of an international child abduction treaty established by the Hague Convention, and within hours of that ruling she was back on a flight to her native country with the children. Aside from the Supreme Court's refusal to hear an appeal, the story disappears.

I usually like looking up old buddies and reading about them. However, my memories of my friendship with about this guy are certainly colored by this incident. What was he thinking? Probably not about the children: their mother was devoted and loving, and I have no doubt she was an excellent mother. This was about him, and his rights. I understand wanting what you think you're entitled to - but not at the expense of your children's stability.

Weird stuff.

Extended Family Again

I'm visiting the extended family again and working at the office with all the other folks. I got here Saturday. I spent many hours in the Memphis airport, where my connecting flight was cancelled. I yelled at the TV when they replayed George W. Bush's weekly radio broadcast, where he used over and over again the word "nucular." After about the third time, I proclaimed, to the chagrin of the 50ish Baptists about five feet away, "IT'S NU-CLEE-AR."

I saw my daughter and her family yesterday. We had a nice dinner out, and the kids are still just wonderful. My grandson actually spoke briefly to me - he doesn't know me well, and doesn't seem to like me much, but when we left he gave me a hug and said, "Bye, Nana!" Of course, my granddaughter is a genius and beautiful and thrives on attention.

I enjoyed working in the office today. I brought King Cakes with me, and many beads. King Cake #1 was finished up, but #2 will wait until tomorrow. Good stuff.

I'm detaching somewhat from the DAMU boards a bit. I had an overblown reaction to an incident there, and decided that these things are WAY too important to me. I will have to find other ways to write. I'm still reading, but they will do just fine without my brilliant ideas. And I'll have to find different things to have brilliant ideas about.

No Place

I have hung out for almost four years on the New Order Mormons discussion board. It’s had its ups and downs, but things have been cruising along quite nicely for the past few months. Lots of new people, lots of good discussion.

There have always been a wide range of beliefs among NOMs. We haven’t ever had a measuring stick; if you call yourself a NOM, then you are one.

Then, the believer came.

A believing spouse referred her husband to NOM. She participates on Faces East, another board for believing spouses of unbelieving LDS or neverMo’s. She decided to stick around and supervise.

Her participation entirely blows out of the water what we’re at NOM to accomplish. How open can you be in a conversation with someone who asks, “I don’t want to go to the temple and my wife is upset about it” when said wife is participating in the discussion? If you give him good advice, and he follows it, she’ll question his motives. If you give him lousy advice and he follows it, she’ll blast you.

I don’t have a good opinion of believer/non-believer interactions. My experience has been that NOTHING GOOD comes of interacting with unrelated believers from a skeptical/NOM/faithless POV. Apparently, however, my almost-four-years of experience with this is apparently not as valid as a bunch of newbies squishily deciding that we should all just be able to get along. Kum-bah-yah. Right.

So, I’ve lost my safe space.

I don’t remember when I’ve felt so alone.

Customer Service

I hate talking to customer service. It's a joke. In the past ten years I can't think of a single time when I didn't call customer service when they didn't actually make the situation worse. Can't answer my question? Transfer me to a phone that rings but never gets answered. Screw up? Tell me in a snotty voice what I need to do to fix the problem you caused.

One thing about dealing with the offshore customer service in India...they are unfailingly polite, they resolve the problems, and they have lovely accents.

I liked this poster from Despair.com:



While looking for this poster, I found that Despair.com has a new free product - podcasts on The Art of Demotivation. They're really funny. Check them out!

Stupid Cable

My cable went out today. This meant that I was unable to access the internet. Fortunately, I had some things I could work on (training, proposals) that did not require internet access. But it was very frustrating.

On the up side, the cable was out, not just the internet. That meant all I had to do was turn on the TV in the other room to see when it was repaired. When the static changed to voices, I was good to go.

Phone Calls

My new calling is mostly about phone calls, I think. I need to be careful who I call. I made one two-minute call that lasted fifteen.

Also, it’s awkward to ask people for help here. So many have lost so much, and it seems so random. It’s easy for me to forget that, I think, because we came through this all so physically unscathed.

Anyway, it feels quite good to be doing something useful. And there is certainly a lot to be done.

Billing Productivity

VegasJoe's enthusiastic response to my "Crystal Reports" blurb yesterday has encouraged me to wax rhapsodic about my job. I write reports. I am learning new software. I LOVE Crystal Reports. It does so many things, and it is all self-contained. Of course, if I wanted things to be really fast I could write stored procedures to generate the table and then pull the data out, but most of the time it works just fine to have the report do the query, with the grouping pushed down to the server if at all possible, and then I get to write formulae and make them look all pretty and make charts.

I am creating a billing productivity report that shows how many invoices each biller/collector created during a given week, with a % for the month and a total. The idea is that even though the service date ends on 2/3, they don't bill until 2/28 because...well, they don't want to work all month when they could just goof off for three weeks and work hard for one. I'm not saying this is what happens, just that if it does, my report will show that.

It has taken a long time, mostly because it has lots of little formulae, and also because I had to figure out a way to determine what week a particular day falls in. And then I decided that I don't like my date selection parameters (because if they select a date range longer than a month, they'll get garbage). So, I am fixing that, and trying to figure out how to get the description of a parameter (vs. the parameter itself) into a variable for the subtitle.

Oodles of fun. I have high expectations of doing ever more interesting things with linked subreports, etc. Maybe I can even learn to do stuff on the web.

Boring?

One of the things that happens when I go back to work is that my writing productivity goes down. Way, WAY down. I've been going since 6:45 this morning and I literally JUST sat down for a few minutes on the computer before I jump in again with homework for the little boy.

Also, I have so little to write about! I'm simply too busy to write about interesting things, and most people would probably not find my work interesting. Well, maybe Vegas Joe. Perhaps I will write something about my frustration with trying to embed SQL in a Crystal Report document so it will pull the date of the invoice associate with a payment. Don't y'all just tingle with anticipation?

We went to Big State University Saturday to see older son. We took him a new monitor. He is delighted with it.

Three weeks and one day until Mardi Gras. I will be out of town for the Mona Lisa Moon Pie Parade on February 18th. However, I will be back in time for Selene on February 24th. I think it might be fun to head in to the city on The Day this year, if only to support the festivities. I feel obligated to party in New Orleans on Mardi Gras. It's my civic duty.

DH pointed out a fun bumper sticker to me the other day: "Rebuilding New Orleans, One Beer at a Time."

The Unitarians: Week Two

I have spent some time on my calling this week; mostly just getting a list of people who might be able to “sit” with an older woman who has a broken leg. Her daughter wants to go out two days a week for a half-day each time. I see about 20 women I can ask, and I’m only up to the “N’s.”

I went to Relief Society today. I didn’t attend sacrament meeting because DH didn’t have an early meeting, and I had slept in a bit. OK, I slept in a LOT. 9:00! Anyhow, RS was very nice. We talked a bit about extended family.

I went to the UU meeting again before RS, and it was interesting. Apparently they sing the same welcome song and the same closing song every week. Their hymns are still somewhat hymn-like, though TOTALLY different from the LDS hymns. The order of service is also always the same. Today’s reading was from the Bhagavad Gita. It was very inspiring. The sermon was about moving forward with hope after what we’ve been through, and was also good.

The minister has resigned. He said he has determined, since the hurricane, that the congregation will be better served by a different kind of minister and that he would be served better by a different ministry. I take it that this has been a difficult time for him, and he doesn’t want to stay here any longer. I absolutely relate to this.

Apparently, this is not how things are normally “done.” The interim ministers don’t become available until July, so they are going to find an interim interim minister. They get help from the district and their sister congregations for this. Then, in July, they’ll start searching earnestly for a permanent replacement. They will no longer have financial assistance from the district for the minister’s salary after July. This is apparently some concern for them, as their numbers have just been decimated by Katrina.

This entire process seems very strange, and yet, proper to me. They are worried about money. They make their own decisions, but have assistance from wealthier congregations in these difficult times, and the resources of a district to draw from. They operate within a fairly structured framework but have an enormous amount of personal freedom. The UU principles are well-defined.

I like it there. I’m going to give it the rest of February doing both, and see how that works. I think it’s interesting that attending RS was really quite pleasant today, and I think that may be because I did something positive for myself, too.