Emma 30 år!:

There is a little girl called Emma/Lotte in Skandinavien...
But when she's abroad her name is Betsy.
This little girl is mostly happy but sometimes she is....
Yeah that's right, she is fuzzy!!!

hey, betsy in the books is exactly my age! cool.

these, by the way, are great books. i never knew they were translations. go read about them and her alterego, emma/lotte.

Rheumatoid Arthritis by drdoc on-line:

"It has enormous socio-economic impact
There is a :

6 times probability of severe limitation of activity
90% of patients have significantly reduced function after 10 years
50% of patients are severe disability after 10 years
80% of patients are moderately disabled after 17yrs
30-50% of patients are able to work after 15 years
Costs : $777 million (USA 1983) / year
It is a mistake to think that this is a benign disease, and there is significant mortality associated with the disease.
Mortality at 10 years is 26.7% vs 15% for the average population. "

"aw," you think. "but betsy doesn't seem that disabled!"

(or, "wait! betsy's disabled?")

i'm not too badly off, actually, but reading about what i have to look forward to isn't precisely a cheerful process at the moment.

The U.S. belongs to us, remember?By Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate:

As Paul Krugman pointed out in a Sunday New York Times Magazine article, getting ourselves into a such a dire financial mess that we have to kill off or at least dramatically reduce Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not just a slight miscalculation on the part of our leaders. They want to undo both the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt.
But I think there is something even worse being taken, being stolen, by this administration. As Jim Hightower observes in his excellent new book, Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back, what they're really stealing is the very idea of this country, the idea that there's a common good, that we're all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better.
In this country, we have the most extraordinary luck -- we are the heirs to the greatest political legacy any people have ever received. Our government is not them -- our government is us (with room for improvement, to be sure).
All this right-wing propaganda about how the government is The Enemy, the government needs to be strangled, needs to be starved, needs to be hocked off, as though schools and hospitals were horrible things -- it's all nuts.
It's our government. We can still make it do what we want it to when we take the time and put in the energy it takes to work with other people, organize, campaign and vote. We can still make the whole clumsy, money-driven system work for us. And it's high time we did so.

other blog is giving me publish errors... can i publish here?

went over to sigrid's house last night and spent time making googly eyes at the baby. what a fine strong cute baby with amazing neck control he is.

i also spent some time with various dogs on my lap, reassuring them that i did, in fact, still love them, even though i was also fond of this new squally thing.

he does, however, seem to be nocturnal at the moment.

pictures will be developed soon, and i've volunteered hosting space. wheee!

oh, slacker slacker slacker me.

there was in fact a supercon meeting last monday night, and this monday night there will be flyer puttingtogethering. tuesday night, i saw once upon a time in mexico which was good, although violent. wednesday, i got a haircut, and thursday, nathan and i packed to go to iowa. well, there was some packing, but also some napping. friday, we drove to cedar rapids and took the dog. she travels pretty well. she's nervous, but settles down after a bit. she likes having the crate to hide in.

on saturday, our friends dave and amy got married, at a hawaiian luau. yes, in cedar rapids iowa. all three of us wore our hawaiian shirts, as did the rest of the attendees. laura handed off the supercon flyers to me (for tonight's flyer extravaganza) and we pressed flyers upon a few attendees.

saturday night, little m. was born. more on that in a minute.

saturday night, we drove back from cedar rapids. there is toooo much iowa, i'll have you all know.

sunday morning, abby and my mom and i went out to the renaissance festival, and my mom bought a bright purple corduroy cloak, and a pair of custom made boots. i was kind of worried that she'd fall down and go boom-- balance and grace are not our strong points in this family, and the ground out there is desperately uneven, but no such thing happened. whew.

sunday afternoon, i rescued sigrid and jennifer from the service station where they were perched after having (in a fit of some steering fluid excitement) brought sig's car there. then off to home to try not to take a nap so that i could get back on some regular sort of sleep schedule, as mine is skewed seriously nightowlward at the moment. family dinner happened at its usual time, and then off to see the cutest baby redhead that i know.

he was born saturday night at about 830pm, after a slightly eventful but turning out all right labor. 10 pounds, 3 ounces, 22 inches long. (all together now, owwww!) we went to go see him on sunday night, and he's a little sweetheart and hardly looks like winston churchill at all.

i have no pictures yet, but once i do, i'll post links.

Linkin Park Lyrics: Don't Stay

Don’t stay
Forget our memories
Forget our possibilities
What you were changing me into
Just give me myself back and
Don’t stay
Forget our memories
Forget our possibilities
Take all your faithlessness with you
Just give me myself back and
Don’t stay

for the record, while there have been times in my life where i would have adopted this as my personal anthem and sung it loudly at every possibility, this is not one of those times.

it's just stuck in my head and won't get out. so i feel a need to share.

The Village Voice: Horoscope: Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny:

"LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You have achieved great victories in the past, often because of your graceful willpower or fine intelligence. At other times they have been the result of your unflagging commitment to creating harmony. But none of those skills will be your main source of power during the turning point just ahead. As you pull off this next big triumph, your secret weapon will be your flourishing imagination.

i think i'm in trouble. i don't have a flourishing imagination.

let me know if you see one on sale at target, okay?

my alarm didn't go off this morning-- not the most auspicious start to the day.

now, however, i'm at work, and there aren't very many tickets. so i'm studying cissp stuff. later tonight, there will be a supercon meeting.

oh, the excitement, i tell you! oh, oh!

the rest of september and october are busy busy busy for me. i free up the weekend of the 25th of october.

MEDLINEplus: Vaccine Against Autoimmune Disease to Be Tested

MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - British scientists are developing vaccines to reprogramme the body's natural defences against autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

i suspect that i speak for many people when i say "aaaaaack! hurry the fuck up!"

our server is down at home, so i can't log into l-space and tell everyone what i had for lunch today. (we talk about that a lot, there. well, what everyone had for lunch, not just me.)

i can post here, though, although it won't publish until the server is back up.

i am wearing my pretty pretty opal triplet bracelet that nathan bought me at worldcon. ooooh, shiny.

i bought plane tickets yesterday to go to piglet's birthday party.

um um um. i had more exciting things that i wanted to share with the world, but i've gone and forgotten them.

(p.s. foot long bmt from subway. mmm.)

x e n e y d o t c o m:

It's not ever going to be just a date, is it? Or maybe it is. It's hard to guess, only two years after the fact. But still, it always jumps out. I still occasionally get a case where someone was arrested on September 11, 2001, or was supposed to go to trial that day but the minute order says that the judge sent everybody home. And every time, I stop. I stop even if the date says September 11, 1999.

i'm staying home from work today (for unrelated reasons), and my first thought wasn't "staying home on thursday", it was "staying home on september 11th". our contractor is coming over to look at our attic tonight, and she and i had a hard time talking about it. "thursday, september 11th, right?" [long pause] "i think there's something going on that day. other than the anniversary, i mean."

spending time this week angsting over things that i either don't actually (when i think about it) want or that aren't good for me. and mentally composing bad poetry about them. i'll spare you the actuality of both the ansting and the bad poetry, and just mention them here in passing.

coming back to the us is hard. i mean, i missed nearly everything here while i was gone, but i'm still in shock from getting back to the things i didn't miss. like, american politics. unsurprisingly, american politics kept on being unutterably stupid while i was gone, and i just mostly didn't think about them. i did my usual scan of newspaper headlines while we were in toronto (i keep wanting to type "totoro"; hi kylee.), but they were all about the beef inspection scandal and the blackout. i peered at these with interest, and i had my home page on the laptop set to news.google.com, but in the second hotel, we had no internet access, so i never read it. the second thing that i really didn't miss is my job. it pays the bills. i continue to be employed. these are good things.

i don't think that i'm going to get around to writing a chronological con report for worldcon. i should just slog away at it for an hour and see what happens, though. just sitting down and doing it usually boots my brain into gear to at least get a skeleton down on paper.

no baby here yet; we're all still waiting. (for those of you tuning in late, it's not my baby.) there will likely be pictures here of the little wiggler once he pops out, though. right now, in my immediate social circle, making plans is difficult. "sure, that sounds great, as long as the baby hasn't arrived yet!" and such.

the antique store that my mother has a booth in had a big sidewalk sale over the weekend. i missed it, due to either working or being at renaissance festival, but my mom had her eye out and found us a great cabinet for our kitchen. this will double our counter space. whee!

abby and i went to fest on saturday, taking along the fabulous ms. pirate. new rule number one: don't spend four hours outside with the dog when it's 95f out. it's scary when the dog is too tired to pant properly. however, i ordered some new boots which i am excited about, and abby bought many fine pretty things. we're going to go back in a few weeks to take my mom out to buy a pair of boots, too. i was very very very good and did not buy the black leather bodice with green vines twining up it, even though it was drop dead gorgeous. (maybe if it's there next year, though...)

alt.polycon report. very long. you have been warned.

the first serious preparation that we did for the trip was to drop the dog off at my parents house for the ten days that we'll be gone. so i slept on thursday night without a pointy nailed little creature located exactly wherever i wanted to be in the bed.

unfortunately, i didn't sleep for long that way. 430am came way too early, and then there was our friend h knocking at the door, to drag us off to the airport. ("i have a baby!" she said. "i'm up then anyhow!" she said. let me tell you, she didn't look very awake then either. she and nathan dragged stuff out to the car, and i made certain that lights were off and that we had everything and that the dog didn't fling herself out the door. (i succeeded admirably on that last, but mostly because the dog was in south st. paul with my parents, as previously mentioned. not too physically or mentally agile at 5am, me.)

we got checked in quite easily, although we had to chat with the nice checkin agent instead of doing completely manual checkin, because she had to examine our passports. then off to disturbing airport fast food for breakfast, and waiting for the plane to board.

we flew first to detroit, where we had ten minutes to rush down from one gate to another before the plane to toronto started to board. i [heart] moving sidewalks.

it takes approximately 30 seconds to fly from detroit to toronto. okay, maybe an hour. but no longer than that. we had just hit cruising altitude when we started to come back down.

customs/immigration in canada was smooth as always, although i had to think consciously about not explaining to the customs agent why i thought he was a sexist jerk. this would not have enhanced my day or his, although i'm doubting that he'd have ended up stripsearched because of it and i'm not sure about me.

we wandered outside and found the airport express ticket counter, and handed over most of my vestigial canadian money from the last time i was up here. we then handed over our luggage and hopped on the little bus. we drove around the airport to the other terminals, at which point i repeatedly thought "thank goodness we didn't rent a car. thank goodness we didn't rent a car." oh, the joy of not having to drive out of that airport.

at the next terminal, a woman who looked suspiciously fannish climbed on. she then did several more suspiciously fannish things, and made a cellphone call. "bill? this is leslie." hmmm, i thought. hmmmmm.

when we all got off the shuttle bus at the holiday inn on king, my suspicions were confirmed; it was in fact leslie from alt.poly and she was here for the con.

we all went in and tried to check in to our rooms, but were told that we couldn't have them until 4pm. ah, well. we stowed our luggage with arturo, who was apparently the concierge.

one of the early lunch groups had just left (i think this was at about noon or one pm, toronto time), but there was another about to run off to kama (an indian restaurant), so we joined that one. rj, ruthanne, aahz, lore, nathan, me, umar, joe, and fmmo (apologies if i've forgotten anyone!) all had a quite nice buffet lunch including muttar paneer which suspiciously had spinach not peas in it, and what was apparently quite tasty mango glop if you didn't have a texture issue with it. joe, in a wild departure from every other time i saw him this weekend, was wearing a t-shirt that didn't a) reference his sex life or b) invite you to participate in it. (it was, however, bright red.)

then back to the hotel for sitting around waiting for our rooms to become available. we actually got into the rooms before 4pm, and i wonder if it was due to horror on the parts of hotel employees realizing that there would just be more and more and more of us in the lobby. we agglutinated bill and paula and rhona and laura and cally and whole huge lumps of people whose names i should have written down earlier because now i've forgotten who was there. nathan and i amazed several people with our fine new laptop (upon which i am writing this) and the game marble drop. much fun.

then finally, up to the room with our stuff, and then running around the hotel trying to find the function space. rhona had told us the room number, and there had been some mutterings about "use the other elevator bank", which got us there in plenty of time, since the clock in the room is fast. we called the consuite and plaintively asked if we had the right space, which we did; just a bit early, since badges had come out and people had descended upon them.

first, there were announcements and the pointing out of the people responsible. then i quickly proposed a photo policy which engendered only some small arguing, and then, the introductions! we all said our names and our hat sizes (okay, not really), and then b.c. repeated them all back. i felt pretty good that i could mostly do that for the contents of the room, although sometimes i had one of several possible names. ("er, teddywolf! no, no, foodgod! no, no...")

after that, i dashed up to the consuite to grab my badge and do some preliminary decoration of it. (i feel your pain stef; two sweeties and, er, um... probably some other people who ought to be acknowledged. although i agree with rivka about tocotoxen only get one sticker, no matter how many of them there are. if they're that complicated, how is one expected to count?)

i won't fill it in, but basically any time i was in a panel i was crochetting like mad due to an incipient baby back home, and any time i wasn't in a panel, i was in the consuite talking to people and having fun there. just for the record. insert that in any paragraph breaks, okay?

dinner friday night was at verona, directly across the street from the hotel. kitten, rj, jeff, nathan, leslie, me, and rivka. many of us had the filet mignon special, the details of which i cannot remember. what i can remember is the fact that it was splendiferous, and that it nearly made rivka fall off her chair, she was so happy. the escargot was also pleasing, as was the tapenade, and the tower of tiramisu was almost too beautiful to eat.

panels started at 8pm, and we made it back only a little bit late. the first panel was happy poly things, and after some discussion of why things don't always get posted to alt.poly, we went around the circle and talked about happy poly things for us. (mine was the not-a-babyshower that i am planning at the moment. i shall post all the details in a month and a half after i've actually pulled it off.)

915pm: old relationship energy. ruthanne was surprised to find out that she was the baby of the panel, but said many good things anyhow, susan r talked about being happy and comfortable, and then there was the totally overwhelming cuteness of ryk, louise, and peggy. i wanna be them when i grow up.

after panels, many people went to the consuite. i managed to simultaneously get a spot to sit on the floor, compliment certain bits of iain's anatomy, and throw myself at ruthanne's feet. go, me! i stayed up in the consuite until 1am (and what a bad idea that was, sleep wise), but tottered off to bed then.

the first panel i made it to in the morning was sex-lite poly, in which i revealed that i was an unevolved troglodyte who wants to have there be sex (or at the very least a deep unfulfillable longing for same) in her poly relationships. rj and sue d. held down the more evolved side of the conversation. it was a good although sparsely attended panel which i can remember very little about. (rj, don't put me on anything before lunch next year, okay?)

then there was lunch, which was at a place that was all about chicken. i can't remember the name for the life of me. rj, ruthanne, if, oksana, nathan, and ian h and i all went. i had a yummy veggie burger, and ian h and i smoffed about wiscon most of the time. [looks embarassed]

after lunch, there was the "communicate mumble mumble" panel, which i found somewhat enlightening and somewhat irritating. indirect communication gets a bad rap. anyhow. elissa suggested that direct communication was more midwestern and indirect more southern, which caused me to mentally note that minneapolis is not actually in the midwest. heh. after the panel was over, i suggested a panel for next year to rj, in which the participants would trade indirect communication hints and tips, and to which you could only be admitted if you could ask someone indirectly to change the state of the blinds in the room.

at 3pm, there was the "where's my flying /c/a/r/ commune?" panel (actually titled "it wasn't supposed to be like this!") at which people talked about what their ideas of poly had started out as and what they're doing now instead. ryk, when he came into the room, shut all the blinds, which made nicole and i laugh. i swear i didn't even talk to him beforehand, though, so unless indirect communication really *is* telepathy, i had nothing to do with it.

breakup etiquette was the next panel, and people told bad breakup stories, some of which were on themselves.

and at 530pm, there was the "should i post this to alt.poly or lj" panel, which was a total and complete hoot. i had no idea what it was going to be like, but they showed up with a list of things that could be posted, and then sorted them out by who'd post what where, taking contributions from the audience. i am not doing this justice; it was great.

dinner was at the restaurant next door to the verona, the name of which i've forgotten. what a lot of us there were! ryk, louise, peggy, jeff, lore, rivka, misha, nathan, me, carol... and that could be it. or else i'm forgetting two people, for which i'm endlessly sorry. i had canneloni and twisted jeff's arm so that he would split a bottle of disturbingly pink wine with me. (yes, i like pink wine. i also like single malt. so you can't be *too* mad at me...) ryk dashed off, since he was on the panel after dinner, and the rest of us strolled over and caught the panel slightly after it started. i was too tired to be in that panel, and while i was physically there for it, i'm not remembering much.

i then went up to the consuite, where i moped around a little bit (note to self: all emotional interactions at cons will be weird by virtue of happening at a con. note two: don't start emotional interactions before dinner as your blood sugar level is about to crash which makes it hard to react gracefully.), but then got over it. lore snagged me, and we went off to filking to drop some things off for aahz, and then to the hotel bar (nonsmoking, woo woo!) where we talked with luc, nicole, and fmmo for a bit, and admired the barbie pinkness of their cosmopolitans. (i stuck to diet coke, personally.) lore had apparently not lost as much of the english language as i had, and said that she was going off to sleep. through excited pointing and making funny noises, i signalled that i also was going to sleep, so we wandered off for an exciting and romantic elevator ride together. (er, not really. but it was an elevator ride.)

the brunch was scheduled to start at 930am, but started a little late. this was fine, because not so many people were there at 930am. rj and i consulted and realized that neither of us had any idea of the dates of the colorado apc, and that it wasn't on the form. we made an abortive attempt to call serene, but since her move, we didn't have the right number. fortunately, at the last moment, my brain kicked in (and pre-caffeine, to boot!) and i raced upstairs to the very computer that i'm typing this on to check my email archives where i had the date. whew.

i took lots of pictures at the brunch, which i will sort out soon and figure out which ones i can post.

after brunch, there was the living shy panel, at which the panelists hardly talked at all (go figure) although jeff and misha did a good job of making sure that people who wanted to talk got to talk, inspite of the few talkative extroverts at the panel. (you know who you are... :)

the last two panels i ditched in favor of hanging out in the consuite, i do believe. rj had been mentioning wanting to hold the far fetched fantasies panel in the pool, but even still, the comfy couch was calling to me. i crochetted and watched people and got to watch people do uncomfortable relationship negotiation in public, and after the last panel was over, watched the consuite slowly get taken down and apart.

nathan and i snagged bc and siobhan just as they were about to head out for sushi, and bc drove us in her fabulous electric green car up to queen street to sushi bistro, which had quite good (although not spectacular) food. mmm. we also learned a few things about sneaky canadian traffic lights (if you throw yourself onto the street underneath yellow lights with x's on them, traffic is required to not squish you, and a blinky green light is a left turn signal.)

then, back to the consuite where i looked decorative and many people helped carry things down to various cars. (in situations requiring carrying things and/or walking, i'm really best at looking decorative and/or supervising, sadly. on the other hand, i haven't yet had to take the rescue drugs that my rd gave me for the trip, so i'm all excited about that.)

cally, umar, and nathan went off and played empire builder, and laura, songbird, suzanne, joe, occasionally fmmo, occasionally aahz, and i went to my room to talk instead of playing games. suzanne made a point of letting us all know that she had toes. she was quite emphatic on this subject. it was late; i can't blame her. ;) everyone went off to bed, eventually, and i locked the door and climbed into bed myself, for my official last act of alt.polycon 10 in toronto. whew!

stuff that needs to be mentioned: the concoll rocks. rhona held stuff together on friday afternoon while the hotel was being weird. ldot and rhona had a great consuite. carol and bc put together some really good programming (it induced cloning wishes in me; that's a good sign), the program book and website were beautiful as well as functional, oksana, ruthanne did roommate coordination again and it seemed to have worked out well, and what a fine hotel it was, in a great location, and it was very amusing having all the signs say "ld50 entertainment", so siobhan also rocks. woo!

(and now it's much later, and i've come back home after going to worldcon, about which more in my blog later.)

How rich are you? >> I'm loaded. It's official. I'm the 48,572,565 richest person on earth!

The Ambassador Wilson Affair: The End of Karl Rove – And George Bush?

(Sep 2) This is the hottest and most explosive story behind the scenes in Washington in terms of how it could affect the Bush administration.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been turning up the heat in this situation. He revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.

The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush’s so-called White House advisor.

for those of you not up on this bit of doubletalk, "liquidated" means "killed".

if anyone sees any other confirmation or any other sources for this, please let me know. i'm cribbing from avedon carol who says that she's not sure how seriously to take it.

why the gems electronic voting system is worse than useless.:

"Let's re-cap, shall we?
· MS-Access allows unlimited tampering with the elections data.
· There's also an easy way to defeat the GEMS Admin password.
· The audit trail has been left wide open to the point of uselessness. Even if it wasn't, alterations that are done in Access never make it to the GEMS audit log anyways - the log items are CREATED by GEMS, not by Access.
· Therefore, the only reason you'd need to tamper with the GEMS password by copying the password from a new datafile is if you wanted to check your dirty deeds in the GEMS program. Somebody who knows GEMS inside and out will never have to do that - they only need alter the data in MS-Access.

gems stores it's data in access format. microsoft bloody access.

News 14 Carolina | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | Bush meets with key U.S. ally on Iraq:

"Bush meets with key U.S. ally on Iraq
9/3/2003 11:03 AM
By: Associated Press

(WHITE HOUSE) -- President Bush is trying to assure his allies that he'll seek more international cooperation in Iraq.

After a meeting with Bush at the White House, the prime minister of the Netherlands said Bush assured him he'll seek a larger role for the United Nations and urge more nations to send in peacekeeping troops."

no con reports yet; i need to get the one that's written off the laptop and then spend a few hours writing the other one.

in the meantime, however, it's weird being home. i mean, it's good, too. sig and i went out to ancora for dinner last night and had yummy dinner and then i went and bought roughly a bajillion cds, and toby and connor and jake (as well as sigrid, i should say) missed me, and that's all good.

but i keep wondering if tammy needs any help in program ops, and why i haven't seen davey or chip or kathy or tracey or tammy or cally or james or or or recently, and if i can afford any more angelwear beautiful shiny things, and i don't need more books right now because james just gave me some but i'll need some later but i should buy them from bakka because i can buy from dreamhaven when i get home.... er, wait, which i am. home, that is.

but the dog is soooo happy to see me, and i get to babysit the bazling tonight. so that's pleasing.

hello? hello? is this thing on?

we're home now, as of last night. we moved to a new hotel (the fairmont royal york) on wednesday night, and it had no internet access in our room, despite being quite nice in nearly all other regards. there was an internet lounge, but it was running linux on pentium 2's, as a demand management device. (that's my theory, and i'm sticking to it.) i could only be in there for a little while before i was driven out by either going slowly, very slowly, mad by the speed, or before i had to escape people who thought that the computers would work better if they hit them more.

i have nineteen gazillion emails to read and answer, work is just like i left it, and my car still does that irritating thing.

but toronto was cool. more on that later.