Monthly Archives: November 2010
Did You (Can You) Pass Math?
Did You Pass Math? is a blogware plug-in that “restricts comment spam by throwing the commenter a simple math question.” It works about 100% of the time against automated coments. Unfortunately, it also works about 50% of the time against real coments. When it fails, it eats your comment. I think it fails most often around suppertime.
Here’s the scoop. Either include a nice, Dunning-sized scoop of rum raisin ice cream with your comment or write your comment in a separate app like Notepad or your word processor of choice, then copy and paste it into the comment field.
Thanks!
Getting It Up Early
I have a houseful of visitors here in the Keys. I don’t understand that. In our more than 30 years in Vermont, we can count our out-of-state visitors on our fingers. Here in Paradise, visitors are numbered like grains of sand. Anyway, our friend Missy noticed that I was “up bloody early” today (Biff was still snoring then).
“No,” I told Missy. “It is the clock that has changed. I’m up at the exact same [solar] time I get up every morning.”
Thanks to the visitors, I was actually late-ish getting to bed last night and therefore late-ish getting to sleep. Late-ish is defined as early-ish by Daylight Savings standards but later in terms of the hour at which I planned to arise. The alarm makes sure I rise correctly no matter how long the temptations of the night before seduce me.
Farmers have lived according to the sun for as long as there has been fixed base agriculture. Although my great-grandfather was a dairy farmer — I grew up on the last few acres of his farm, then made a home on the last few acres of a former Vermont dairy farm — I do not farm. I prefer sleeping in and generally like to roll out of bed about 30 seconds before I have to go to work. It also means I can see the sunset, the moonrise, and the clocks strike midnight.
Clock setting is arbitrary, all because somebody in “the dawn of time” jammed a stick in the ground and decided that getting his farm workers up at 4 ayem was a good idea. Some of us don’t agree. Russia’s 11 time zones are all an hour ahead of the corresponding standard time zones and double that during DST.
Ben Franklin wrote satirically that Parisians should go green and save candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He didn’t seriously propose Savings Time, though, no matter what you read on the Internoodle. That honor falls to George Hudson, an amateur New Zealand entomologist who wanted to collect insects in after-work daylight.
I don’t understand why we don’t just choose a time we like permanently.
Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, most Indiana on Eastern Time, don’t switch their clocks. Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time year round. They, along with India, China, and Japan are the major industrialized states that are constant UTC+something 12 months out of 12, while the rest of us spend seven months of the year with “extra” daylight and nearly five months without.
Not even all of Arizona is exempt. The Navajo Nation does observe. The Navaho have the largest land area of any Native American jurisdiction within the United States with 26,000 square miles that covers all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico.
Changing the clocks irritates me but I’m not rabid about sticking on solar time except I have a regular morning phone call with one of the non-mainstream states.
A friend who lives there “finds it irritating that we have to rearrange our meetings every time all y’all flip to another time, and irritating that I have to think “Is it two or three hours different when I call my dad? Is it one hour or the same when I call my daughter or mother?”
Exactly.
My choice is to synch my own schedule rather than force the others on that call to rearrange theirs.
It just seems bloody early to start the morning to Sally. And to me.
For the record, my European web host thought this post went up at 13:00.
The Aftermath — Part IV, Sex and Secrets and Match.com
Secrets.
“It has never been a secret but there are people who didnt know,” I wrote a couple of months ago. “It really is simple. Anne and Nancy are two beautiful ladies. Why ever would I not want share my love for them with the world?”
Despite the openness of this series, Nancy and I have been reticent to come out of the closet in our mainstream lives.
“That has less to do with freaking out,” Nancy said, “and more to do with the fact that most people don’t have to make a big deal out of their lifestyles because they step up to the ‘normal’ line.”
I like that. Anyone can read those blogs but the number who do so far seems limited to people we know and people we have invited. Plus the odd spammer. I’m not interested in having a relationship with the latter. And as match.com points out, “Polyamorous people generally discuss their [private] lives much in the same way others do: rarely, and only with people around whom they feel comfortable doing so.” It’s much the same as talking about politics or religion. Except, of course, that elsewhere on these pages I bash politics and religion, too.
“One of the most awkward things that can happen in a pub is when your pint-to-toilet cycle gets synchronized with a complete stranger,” Peter Kay said.
Keeping secrets = not sharing?
Secrets, not sharing: I’ve wondered about my Relationship status on Facebook. Only Mr. Zuckerberg knows why I can’t write “with Anne” and “with Nancy” but I know why I haven’t. Yet. We haven’t quite come out that far. We have cow orkers as friends. We have children. I have grandchildren. They all can read the poly blogs but they haven’t called us on them (yet).
A better status line might be “ask me and I’ll probably tell you.”
Not sharing = keeping secrets?
I will mostly answer any question asked but I volunteer only what I want you, dear reader, to know or what my audience expects to know. And I’m careful with restroom timing. That’s not sharing but it does mean I have one or two secrets.
Like knowing where to park in Key West.
The sharing question fits in with Nancy’s trip planning. She visited the Keys and told TUFKAS only generalities about the trip. I visited Arizona and withheld most details about that trip. Anne went to Arizona and told me all about Pringles. Nancy went on a family cruise and shared the typical vacation photos.
Anne and the dear, close friend we called “Sally” are in the Keys this month. Up North, the girls bowl on Mondays and play cards on weekends. Here they don’t bowl, so they go to the beach and play cards every day. They drove to Key Weird yesterday. Anne hasn’t been to Key West for a while, so I gave her the piddle pass1, some high points to look for, and told her where I leave the car. Key West is a place for walkies.
“You’ve parked there with me before,” I said.
“Nooooo.” And I could see the “you parked there with her” thought go right across her forehead in bright lights.
Anne’s pique over parking came not because I found a nice (free) 10×20 piece of real estate in a tiny city where that plot is gold. It came because I did something with Nancy that perhaps I did not do with Anne.
The match.com article explores the day-to-day realities of poly living and loving to answer the question of whether polyamory might be the right lifestyle choice for you but it spends a lot of words on the (kinky) sex and it doesn’t look at how much you tell one partner about what you do with another.
How much do I share with one partner about what I do with the other?
That depends. Anne spurns the stories and photos of hugging the statue on the cornah in Winslow, Arizona, or watching a shark in the shallows off Crane Point. Nancy embraces the stories and photos of concert planning in North Puffin or the ferry across Lake Champlain, foliage, and a picnic at the Crown Point Historic Site.
1 My folks always called their unlimited Florida State Parks pass a “piddle pass” because they could stop to use the facilities at any of 160 state parks and reserves. As an aside, they usually saw somebody pretty cool there, too.[Editors Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her piece, Those Scuffy Areas We Don’t Talk About, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]
Premte Peeves
San Francisco mandates no happy ending. The city of light and love has banned happy meals. That’s a nanny too far.
Voters in the heartland have generally wanted to do the happy dance since Tuesday but S.F. banned happy dances, too.