Yesterday the CA Senate Judiciary Committee had a hearing on a bill that I went to testify on. Left the house with Mrs. ShottleBop just before 3 in the afternoon, and arrived at the Quality Inn in downtown Sacramento shortly after midnight. Spent the morning (until checkout at 11) in the hotel room, working, then had lunch across the street from the Capitol. Hearing started at 1:30 PM, and there were 60-ish bills to be heard. Seven of them were on the consent calendar, and were not heard--just passed on. Our bill came up at 7:00 PM. By 7:20, the Committee voted to pass the bill on (I, and one other person, had showed up to testify against passage; we were up against the California Bankers' Association and several other financial institution trade groups. We had the right, but no bucks, on our side.)
Left Sacramento approx. 7:30, stopped for dinner at Pea Soup Andersen's in Santa Nella for dinner, and got home by 4:15 this morning. Woke up at 7:30 and came to work.
Quite the 41st wedding anniversary. (Hey, we spent the whooooooooooole day together!)
That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm attending a library conference in Vegas this weekend and what I laughingly call my good foot has decided to start hurting. It started last Friday night when I made the mistake of trying to walk down stairs barefoot. I got two steps down, got a shooting pan and ran back for my shoes. The pain came and went the next day, mostly dull but sometimes stabbing. I didn't notice it Sunday or Monday, but yesterday and today it's back and I'm really getting worried. There is a metric shit-ton of walking at Conference and I have no idea how I'll manage. Wish me luck.
Rent a wheel chair. If you are staying in a decent hotel customer services might even provide you with one free of charge. It can't hurt to ask. Added benefit, you will get lots of sympathy from people.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
It's Vegas, I could probably rent one of those motorized scooters. I'll be packing my best ankle brace. That should help.
Important thing I learned today: I am the only member of my committee who hasn't left for Vegas already. I sent out our agenda and attachments and received a sea of "Out of Office Auto Replies" for my troubles. I guess everyone but me knew the meetings would start early. That or they don't need to ask six months in advance for vacation time.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
That's Pea Soup Andersen's. Very good split pea soup, if you happen to like that nasty sort of crap.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
It's not so much something that's up with me specifically. It's some on going thing with my state. I don't think there's so much nonsense going on in my state to warrant its own thrad - at least that's my great hope. And there's certainly not a thrad about this new thing. I posted a couple of weeks ago about the dipshits who thought it was a good idea to steal drugs that had been seized and sell them, jeopardizing thousands of court cases. This story is actually much more bigger.
Just over a month ago someone noticed something was a bit off on one stretch of road. Turns out it wasn't just something a little off. Something was majorly off. A number of columns supporting a span of I-495 were titled, some as much as 4°. This is very bad. It's bad because this isn't just some small stretch of road. It's a major thoroughfare through the north east. (I-95 runs right through Wilmington, I-495 is the bypass around Wilmington.) What's worse is that it happened relatively fast as this span is inspected at least every two years and as of the most recent inspection everything was where it was supposed to be.
Initial reports were suggesting that the road would be closed at least through Labor Day. That's still the most optimistic plan, the plan where everything goes right and everything happens when and how it's supposed to. I feel optimistic because in about a month they've figured out what went wrong. Though that optimism is tempered by what it is that went wrong.
Delaware's environmental agency for years ignored nearly 2 acres of contaminated land near an I-495 bridge in Wilmington, missing opportunities to prevent a 50,000-ton stockpile of dirt that likely damaged the span of the interstate now closed for $20 million in emergency repairs.
The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control failed to include the property near the bridge in a longstanding cleanup plan – a step that could have protected the bridge from damage by preventing so much dirt from being piled nearby without any oversight.
One expert said last week that if DNREC would have carried out its environmental oversight on the property south of the I-495 span, the agency could have prohibited the dirt dumping that caused the bridge damage.
"The soil would have never been stockpiled on the southside remnant," said C. David Jamison, a retired Delaware Department of Transportation engineer now in private business.
DNREC officials acknowledged last week that the dirt stockpile site appeared to have been overlooked in final plans for a larger cleanup area. The agency earlier said the pile site was not tied to any cleanup project.
It's not so much something that's up with me specifically. It's some on going thing with my state. I don't think there's so much nonsense going on in my state to warrant its own thrad - at least that's my great hope.
This right here is the first thing I think of when I think of either Delaware or worst things:
I heard that almost all European companies that have offices in the US have their headquarters in Delaware because of something something with the corporation laws. That's all I know and it isn't much.
Pressure from shifting soils next to the bridge are believed to have deformed steel piles in the bridge's foundation and displaced them sideways. The ground and pile disturbance in turn fractured the concrete bases of several bridge support columns, with four pairs of concrete columns between the river and Christiana Avenue tipping away from vertical, causing the travel lanes above also to slant.
Engineers say a likely culprit is a 55,000-ton mountain of dirt – that was hauled away this week – stockpiled next to the damaged piers. An investigation by the Delaware Department of Transportation is continuing, with involved parties said to be bracing for liability claims.
Replacement of the two most-damaged sets of bridge supports will occur after the roadway reopens, with temporary beams and towers holding up the spans during construction.
I'm taking a great risk in posting this because I could very well make many people ill and likely get myself enbanninated from this very forum by even mentioning this. There are only a couple of shops that offer this that I could find. At least only two mentioned whenever it's asked in a particular place on the www. They call it the Delaware Pizza. The main but not only ingredient is scrapple. Yes. Scrapple on a pizza.
The contamination is a tertiary issue in this case. The ground on either side of the river was never meant to carry that much weight in one place. Once the dirt was removed the ground and columns recovered some minor amount.
What is up with me is too much so I will narrow it down to two things.
Thing the first:
We should be closing on the sale of our house on Monday or Tuesday. We were supposed to close a couple weeks ago but due to galactic dipshittery on the parts of stuuuuuuuuupid people, it didn't happen. But supposedly it is going to happen in a day or two and we can put this entire stuuuuuuupid mess behind us.
Thing the second:
My mom came out and visited for about five days and we did about a billion things. She arrived Wednesday and we set up my new old dinette and rearranged some in the kitchen.
Thursday she came to my work and got a personalized tour by yours truly and came with me to get some signatures notarized for thing the first. The friendly notary asked about our plans, and on hearing them she said, "you don't really have any down time, do you?" I agreed and said, "we don't do downtime." After work we went shopping at REI and bed bath and beyond.
Friday night she made Hawaiian themed dinner for me and my friend from back in the day, including macadamia nut crusted mahi mahi and pineapple upside-down cupcakes.
Saturday we had very belated Mother's Day brunch, followed by walking tours slash geocaching in my hood. That evening we went to Shakespeare in the park and it was Taming of the Shrew, and let me just say, yuck! So sexist. And don't give me any of that "it was ironic" or "it was tongue in cheek" bullshit because just yuck. We took Gizmo with us everywhere we went on Saturday besides brunch.
Sunday (today) we did a 10K run at the San Jose Sharks, and I set a new personal record by a wide margin, finishing in 52:55. After that we went and toured the Winchester Mystery House, which was awesome! Then she went home and I went shopping some more. I had a bunch of birthday vouchers that are going to expire tomorrow. I got a pair of pants for $1.09 and a pair of Birkenstocks for more than that.
Then I talked on the phone with my honey for a while. I miss him very much.
Does Bey mind that you talk on the phone with your honey?
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
I've got good news and I've got some fucking horribly bad news.
First the good news
Got on the scale tonight, and I am now down to 179 lbs!
That's (at least) 35 pounds I've lost since I started my lo-cal diet this spring.
I have also been running, and I ran a full mile today. This is p. big, because my knees, which I've always been afraid of hurting due to a congenital knee defect, seem to be fine with all this. And I am also up to 200 incline situps (in sets of 50 spread across the day). My once trim form is emerging again from the layers of fat, and I gave all my size 38 and size 36 pants away to Savers, as they do not fit me at all anymore.
I know I will not be able to keep going as low-cal as I have been once I drop down to my goal weight of 155-160 -- my diet consists of an apple for breakfast, a couple handfuls of almonds in the afternoon or evening, then on some days for dinner I have a home-made juice drink made up of super-blended apples, carrots, ginger, lemon and some orange juice to de-thicken (it comes out of the blender with a consistency of tomato paste), and on other days I eat a little of whatever's for dinner. Guessing my caloric intake atm is between 700-1100 most days.
Tomorrow I go see my doctor, who ordered a shit-ton of blood-work on me last week, and crossing my fingers that it's more good news there.
Now the bad news
June 4 was my ten-year anniversary with Mrs. KA. She had gone to NC back in May to visit her dad while he had surgery for congestive heart failure (more bad news, his recovery so far is not going well). Things seemed a bit off before she left, and more so when just before she got back and she texted me that she was going to try to get into the naval reserves in order get medical training and GI Bill money to to med. school. This is all going to take her out of the house for at least two months of basic training and then some number of months unknown while she was trained in whatever her job was going to in the reserves, but I am fine with this because I have been encouraging her to go back to school for years, especially since I finished my MA... So when we took a walk down to the neighborhood beach on June 4 to commemorate our tenth anniversary, she informed me that our relationship was over, and when I tried to discuss counseling or reconsideration she flat out refused to entertain the suggestion. She said she is tired of me being so busy with my career(s) and that it is her turn to do what she has always wanted to do before it is too late, that she also has felt like the relationship had "died" a while (years?) ago, and she had no feelings or interest in an intimate relationship with me any longer. Which was news to me -- while our sex life is certainly not what it was when we met or even a few years ago, we still had one this spring before she left for NC... She did suggest though that she wanted to remain friends and continue to keep a household and to parent our children together -- as long as that would be possible with whatever she ends up doing in the navy.
I agreed to that, which has been both good and bad -- good because I know that if she wanted to she could just throw me out, the state would then stick me with child support for the next 12 years and I would only get to visit Inara a couple times a week instead live with her. And I have seen first-hand with my oldest kid what happens when parents cannot get along after they break up -- I don't want that to happen to my step-kids or to Inara. But it's bad because I was fully committed (still am committed?) to the idea of marriage being "til death do us part." I still want to try to save our relationship by doing whatever possible, and that she had never made it known to me that she was that unhappy that she was ready to quit this entirely. But when ever I have brought that up with her the conversation does not end well at all. Not at all.
Then this week I made an observation, that she is constantly getting text messages and is on her smart phone at all hours of the day and night responding to them -- I know that no one is getting a text from their aunt at 3 in the morning. She then admitted that she is texting a bit with with a friend of hers from NC but that mostly she is texting (and going out on dates with) an ex-army guy she met the first day she went down to the recruiter back in May.
Next week the two of them are taking an overnight trip to NYC together...
I can't believe this is happening. I am completely, utterly crushed by all this.
Wow, KA. Just..wow. Not much I can say but remember the friendly faces here at when things get overwhelming and you need a good laugh/hug/irritating poster.
Re: What's up with you?
for the first time in over a year today.
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