Personal Stuff First

This is gonna be a political post, methinks, but I have a few things to proclaim before I get to the good stuff…

1. My beloved wife has officially lost SIXTY POUNDS! I’m so proud of her I could burst!

2. Four hundred dollars a month is a LOT. Ask me about it sometime.

3. I wish I had more time to take photos. And I wish I knew how to run my camera better.

4. You just gotta try New Belgium Brewery’s “1554” Brussels Style Black Ale. I tell ya, a glass of 1554 (or it’s little brother, Abbey) is a grand thing indeed! Hints of chocolate and coffee, without being sweet… But you have to drink it out of a glass, a real glass glass, not out of the bottle. You can’t sit and guzzle 1554 or Abbey — it’s for savoring, like a fine wine. Best served with rockabilly for some reason — it doesn’t react well to metal or rap. Blues is okay, too… (Be sure to go to New Belgium’s web site; they’re really cool people! If you work there for a while they give you a bicycle. VERY environmentally friendly! I wish I could work there.)

5. Why does beer taste better in the morning? Because it’s so rare to sip on a nice ale before lunch? Forbidden fruit? (Don’t worry, I don’t drink beer in the mornings. Often.)

6. Do I look fat in these genes?

8. For some reason Blogger isn’t showing comments to my last post any more. I’ve had two or three people leave comments that haven’t shown up for some reason. I don’t know why that’s happening, but please rest assured that I’m not deleting the comments or anything — I’m baffled as to what’s happening. (I’m thinking of moving this blog off the server it shares with the rest of my family web site sometime this fall and having Blogger host the blog on Google’s servers. That would give me more control over the appearance of my blog and improved stability, but it will also mean people will have to re-link to the new URL. Anyone have any experience with this? Is it gonna hurt?)

7. I lost my copy of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” and that makes me sad. Libertarians unite! (Not that Heinlein was necessarily a Libertarian himself, but the book seems to lean that way.)

8. I started this post days ago. I was going to write a lot more on politics (see below), but I keep falling asleep. I just don’t feel quite right…

On to the Politics:

I was home sick the other day (see my last post for all the icky details), and was somewhat embarrassed when, wearing scrungy jammie-pants and a T-shirt of dubious taste, I opened the door to let the cat out only to find a lady in an Obama T-shirt standing there, finger poised to push the doorbell. “Oh! Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you” (she glanced at her clipboard, then continued) “Mr. Radloff?” I nodded, agreeing that yes, my name is indeed Mr. Radloff. “I’m with the Obama campaign, and if you have a few minutes, I’d like to answer any questions you may have about the Senator…”

Seeing as this is the very first person to ring my doorbell and want to talk politics with me, I agreed. I’ve never had a politician, staffer, enthusiastic supporter, or even unenthusiastic supporter come to my door wanting to talk about a candidate before… First time for everything! I mean, I’ve only lived here for seven-plus years… (The two nice Jehovah’s Witness men quit coming to my door after they saw exactly what a slightly hung-over hippie bass player looks like the morning after a hard gig.) I stepped outside and gestured to the stoop. “Have a seat.” The lady sat.

“What can I tell you about Senator Obama?” she asked.

I keep up on the candidates. Or at least I try to, anyway. But when put on the spot, it took me a few moments to collect my thoughts… My brain ran down the list. “Edwards, he’s the poverty guy,” my brain told me. “Richardson’s the guy with all the foreign policy experience and the good sense of humor. Hillary just plain scares me. Kucinich is the leprechaun who smiles a lot an agrees with everyone about everything. Dodd dated Princess Leia and hangs out with Paul Simon… Obama — he’s the composed guy who seems to know what’s going on but never really says anything.” Ah, yes. Obama. One of the “Big Three” in my book (along with Richardson and Edwards).

I tried to think of an intelligent question about Mr. Obama to ask the young lady, but I really couldn’t think of anything specific. “Well,” I said, “the things that are most important to me right now are poverty, Iraq, the environment and how we treat veterans, and I know Edwards pretty much has the poverty thing figured out. What does Obama have to offer?”

I forget what the nice lady said, exactly, but it was something predictable, like “The Senator is against poverty.” (Name me someone other than the current administration that’s FOR poverty.) But she continued to tell me how Obama had worked in the bad part of Chicago helping people in dire circumstances. Cool. Okay.

She went on to explain, in fair detail, what Mr. Obama’s positions were on the things important to me. We talked for a considerable time, actually, and by the time she left I was fairly impressed with the lady. She knew a lot about Obama, but wasn’t afraid to say, “I’m not sure about that issue, to be honest. I’m going to have to go ask some questions,” and she wasn’t afraid to give the other candidates kudos where they were deserved. She never bashed a rival candidate, and conducted herself very professionally. I learned a lot about Mr. Obama, though I already knew pretty much what his stance on the issues were…

But by the end of the conversation I’d managed to get something else straight in my mind that had been buzzing around for a while…

Many of the candidates have nearly identical platforms. What I really want to know is: How are you going to see your changes made on a local level? How are you going to get your programs and ideas past the bureaucracy and governmental inertia to a point where it benefits me? There are at least four candidates that I could vote for with a good conscience. But who is going to make a difference? Which one can cut through the clutter to actually make changes?

This question is relevant no matter what party or candidate you’re backing. We need to ask this question. It’s not good enough for a candidate to say, “I back alternative energy, and I think we need to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.” Everyone says that. How are you going to DO that? And I don’t mean the specifics of your plan (“I think we need to look at hydrogen,” or whatever), I mean how are you going to get your plan instigated in my neighborhood? Are you going to take control over certain aspects of local government? Or the reverse — are you going to cut red tape and get the federal government out of the way of the local governments? Are you going to use incentives?

In short, how are you going to get city hall to listen to you?

Illin’

I hate being ill in the summer. It seems fundamentally unfair. Winter is the perfect time to sit home feeling miserable as it’s a miserable time of year already.

It somehow feels comfortable to be ill in the winter. You can close the curtains, turn off the lights, huddle wretchedly over your bowl of condensed chicky-noodle soup and ignore the world, eventually staggering off to the bedroom to pull comfy fluffy blankets over your shivering limbs and take solace gazing at the cold flickering light of the television. No one looks at you strange when you say you have the flu. In fact, people actually expect you to have the flu at some point during the winter. “Have you had the flu yet? There’s something going around!” People eagerly await the story of your illness so they can tell you how much worse THEIR bout with the flu was. Because, as we all know, what ails me is always much worse than what ails you… Invariably, before you can get to the part about how you actually had mucus running out of your ears, you’ll get interrupted with “Oh, you were lucky! When I had the flu I was so sick the neighbors all chipped in on a tombstone for me,” or “That’s nothing — I sneezed so hard my left nostril turned inside-out. See?”

But if you get ill in the summer, it’s just not as fun. You can close the curtains and shut the lights off, but a nice warm bowl of chicky-noodle soup just doesn’t sound good when it’s 95 degrees outside, even if you have the air conditioner on. Snuggling under the blankets doesn’t sound good, either. In the summer, all you can do if you’re ill is lock the front door to keep the neighbor kids from bothering you, then go lie in a puddle of sweat in the bed and stare miserably at the ceiling, hoping you die before the cat runs out of food and starts in on your tasty corpse. (I hate to say it, but I really wish my little buddy Fruitloop would at least wait until I’m in a feverish coma before he starts staring at me like that… It’s creepy.)

Instead of sympathy from friends and co-workers the next day, you get smirks. “Yeah, yeah, sure you had the flu. Which beach did you spend your sick day on, anyway, or were you golfing?” You want to tell them how you were so ill that your eyelids throbbed and turned bright orange, but they just don’t believe you.

Being ill in the summer sucks.

Some quick pics…

The American Legion Riders held their first Healing Run last weekend. Man, that was fun! We raised a fair amount of money for a family in need here in Sioux City, and had a blast doing it… I’ll write more later, I promise.

Ma & Pa are famous now! Check ’em out in the news… (Here’s a photo I stole from the LeMars Daily Sentinel.)

I have a unique family… Ma’s a belly dancer. Pops plays his congas and smiles a lot. My aunt, a retired Lt. Colonel in the Army National Guard, left her career in law to play trombone in the circus band. My other aunt (a retired Master Sergeant in the Air Force) just got back from the Peace Corps not too long ago. My uncle went to Africa with the Peace Corps over 20 years ago and is still there. (My aunt has a web site that explains some of this HERE.) Things are interesting when that side of the family gets together.

Iowa Internet

A lady from the East Coast that I work with via e-mail asked me today why our e-mail is always so questionable here in the Midwest. What follows is my reply:

E-mail is tricky in rural areas. It all stems back to infrastructure, you know. I hear rumors of cable television and fiber optics and other exotic critters that live on the coasts, but here in the mighty Midwest it’s fences.

What they did, way back when they put the original phone lines in, was to run the phone lines along the roads. If a farmer wanted to hook his phone up, he’d request the phone company to run a jumper from the phone line along the road to the farmer’s barbed wire fence. The signal would then run up the fence, where the farmer would run a jumper to his phone. Worked pretty slick! Saved everyone tons of money, rural folk like us got to talk on telephones…

The downside is bad quality, and “party lines.” You see, when someone calls the farmer, everyone else whose phone is hooked to that same stretch of fence would ring.

Once the Interweb started catching on and getting popular, the quality issue came to the forefront. When a couple birds would land on the fence, your modem would crash out and you’d lose your connection. That’s not too bad, ’cause as soon as their little feeties leave the fence your connection comes back on. The real problem is cattle. If a cow rubs up against the fence it grounds out the signal altogether, and all you can do is try to reconnect. Kinda sucks, ’cause the main reason for the fence in the first place is to keep the cattle in, which means there are always cattle hitting the fence.

All of which we’re pretty much used to.

But now we’ve got a problem. The neighbor has a bull that positively, absolutely HATES chickens. Wouldn’t be a problem, except that the guy on the other side of the fence runs a poultry outfit… Most of the chickens steer clear of the fence, ’cause they know the bull will chase them, but there’s one rooster that simply loves to taunt the bull, and will sit on the fence, crowing his little heart out until old Toro comes stampeding over to chase him away… And, of course our Internet goes all wacky since the signal happens to run through that particular fence. So the neighbors are all taking up a collection to buy both the angry cow and the chicken for our Labor Day Celebration so we can keep a constant connection. Chicken and ribs! My oh my… Hand me the barbecue sauce!

And if you believe THAT cock and bull story, I have a bridge for sale…

But we’ve got the biggest…

Here is a phrase I thought I’d never write: The first time I saw my buddy’s little brass balls it surprised me. I even took a picture of the metallic testes in question. You can see them in the photo below.

I thought it was funny. I still think it’s kind of funny, actually. Gracefully tactless. Then I saw this:

What a wonderfully wobbly web we weave…

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff on the web recently, and I kind of enjoy it (at least at the moment). And I’ll tell you why I enjoy it in one word: autonomy. Now I’ll explain that one word in a lot more words…

At my day job at the print shop I very often deal with customers who either know exactly what they want in a design and will nitpick everything I do to death making changes until the job’s on the press, or customers who give me something they’ve already designed on a disk and tell me to print it EXACTLY they way they designed it (never mind that we don’t have the obscure software they used, they did a four-color design and want us to print it in two colors, there are typos all over, etc.). Very rarely do I get to actually do any design work any more — in fact my job title is gradually changing from “Art Director” to “Pre-Press Technician.”

But when I’m designing web sites, most of the time I’m doing them gratis for charities who are more than happy to give me free reign on the entire site — photos, writing, design, all my hobbies come together. This makes me happy. The problem is that while I’m enjoying designing and writing the sites, and I feel good for helping causes I believe in, I’m slowly but steadily going broke. I’d really, REALLY like to get paid for a site one of these days.

But then it would immediately turn into work, and I’d have the same woes I have at my day job…

So, the only time I feel creatively happy, productive, and fulfilled is when I do things for free.

(If you’re bored, here are some sites I’ve done lately — www.nwiaalr.com, www.healingrun.com, www.siouxlandsleepout.com, www.hippieboydesign and www.independentriderscc.com. I need to completely re-do my www.radloffs.net web site some day. (It’s old and, frankly, a little embarrassing in places. I did the entire site in Quark, which is NOT designed to do web stuff. I’m happier using Google’s web design tools now, and I’m slowly learning actual HTML, so my winter project may be redeveloping the site from the ground up, provided I can figure out how to change the cname. I may eventually end up changing URL’s and moving this blog as well.)

Picture Perfect?

Dagmar and I, along with a friend of ours, were the official photographers at a wedding last Saturday. First time I’ve ever done that. Kinda spooky, but loads of fun! Thankfully it was an outdoor biker wedding and we knew almost everyone there.

It was pretty cool — there were chairs in the yard set up for the guests with the traditional aisle going up the middle. On either side of the chairs was a row of motorcycles. The bride’s bike was behind the bridesmaids and the groom’s was behind the groomsmen. The preacher had his black leather vest on for most of the night, though he did take it off for the actual service (as did the groom, surprisingly). The guests were all very respectful and attentive, but every now and then you’d hear a discreet “Pfffft” as a beer was quietly opened during the service. (I have to admit, it was pretty funny watching people fumble around trying to find a place to set their beers when the preacher called for a prayer.) As the newlyweds came down the aisle at the end everyone stood and cheered. Those who happened to be on their motorcycles started the engines and let them roar for a while.

It brought tears to my eyes. Seriously. It was one of the most honest, open, heartfelt weddings I’ve seen. There were no polite handshakes in the receiving line, just big back-slapping hugs.

It felt true.

Leonesse left a comment on a previous post saying they enjoyed looking at the photos of Dagmar and I at our wedding, lo those many years ago back in the early aughts. We did have a cool wedding! We were hitched outside in the park. We flew kites and played frisbee in the afternoon, had a couple kegs sitting out, ate dinner, then got married out by the pond. After the service we had a belly-dancer from Europe dance and the blues band I was in at the time played until after midnight. Someday I’m gonna have to scan in all our wedding photos so I can torture you all with them…

Why is it…

…that when your buddy gets back from the dentist the first thing you do, before even hearing how it went, is to regale him with YOUR last horrible trip to the dentist?

Climate Change

Generally speaking, June and July are fairly nice times in Iowa, and August is hot, dry and dusty. This year, though, July had the characteristics of August. We’ve not seen rain of any significance in months, and the temperatures are generally in the mid to upper 90’s. There’s serious talk that the Big Sioux River could dry up by the end of the summer, a bad thing as the river is used to supply several towns’ drinking water, and farmers use it both for irrigation and to water their livestock.

I’ve seen more vines the past few years than I remember in years past. As a child, vines were seen as tropical things that lived in the jungle. A few people were lucky enough to have some ivy growing on their house, but it was a rarity. Now vines are all over — completely covering old windmills and choking entire trees. I’ve got one on my garage that’s been getting bigger and bigger each year since it started three years ago. I’ve also been seeing cliff swallows all over the place this year — I don’t remember ever seeing them in this area before.

Think Ahead

Oil’s running out. We knew that a long time ago. We had a crisis in the 1970s. Jimmy Carter warned us about it then. Now, thirty-plus years later we’re all surprised that oil is running out.

Here’s the thing. We’re all a bit peeved that our government didn’t do something to prepare for this, but what have WE done to prepare? Think about your company — has your boss done anything to get a jump start on the post-oil economy? I’m not talking about buying a fleet of hybrid cars (though that would be a good step too), but rather about larger things.

Transportation costs are going to skyrocket. Does your company ship raw materials in? How? It may be worth it in the long run to relocate part of your company to a spot a bit closer to the rail lines. Is there a local source for these raw materials? If so, it may behoove you to think about switching over to that source rather than relying on out-of-state resources.

Is anyone thinking of this stuff? I often see an eighteen-wheel semi pull in here at the print shop, spend five minutes backing up to the loading dock, then sit there and idle while the truck driver gets out, opens the back and hand-carries 50 pounds of specialty paper into the shop. We’re paying for that delivery cost, and we have to pass that cost on to the customer. Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective in those cases for us to simply have our delivery guy stop in at the paper supply company with our little delivery van and pick the stock up, bypassing the delivery altogether? Might it not be in our company’s interest to look at seeing if paper would be cheaper if there were no delivery charge attached to it — we can pick it up cheaper than they can deliver it at least half the time. And that saves energy.

The print shop here has a flat roof with black tar on the top of it. Wouldn’t it lower our air conditioning costs (and we do need air conditioning with all this heavy equipment running inside the building) if they’d replace the black tar with something eco-friendly that doesn’t absorb heat, like maybe sod or natural prairie grasses? Sure, it’ll cost a bit now to do that, but won’t it be worth it in the long run? Wouldn’t that make my company a little more competitive in the next few years? I still wish the government would force the power companies to allow personal wind generators — our flat roof here at the shop would be a beautiful place to put a few small windmills to help us power some of the equipment…

Just a few thoughts. I’m going to go ride my bicycle to the bank now.

Apologies

Sorry I’ve been neglecting this poor little blog ‘o mine. Both Dagmar and I have been incredibly busy. I’ll spare you the details, but between problems at work, doing stuff with the American Legion Riders and the Independent Riders for Children & Charities (as well as maintaining their web sites) and life in general, we’ve been running on naught but willpower for weeks. I shall return to writing regularly, I promise! I miss it.

Governmental Inadequacy

United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has GOT to go. The “party of values” has been letting Mr. Gonzales lie to Congress and the American People for too long. It’s time for a change. Mr. Gonzales is a detriment to our government and should be replaced. I have a LOT more to say about this subject, but I’ll refrain. Suffice it to say that I know small children who have a better grasp of what the phrase “take responsibility for your actions” means than Mr. Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George W. Bush.

Heroes

The Atlanta Falcons have a problem. Their star quarterback, Michael Vick, has been indicted for nasty things — notably dog fighting. I have several thoughts on this issue.

1. What sort of man are you if you need to use an animal to prove your masculinity? “I have the meanest dog on the block, therefore I am a big man.” To me that shows a distinct lack of character, confidence, and sense of self. We all do this sort of transference, mostly unconsciously. I know I bought my motorcycle because it’s comfortable, it’s the right size for my purposes, and the price was right. But I also have to admit to a certain vicarious glee in the knowledge that the motorcycle is also big and loud… Some people buy big houses, thinking that will somehow make them better human beings. Old-time big-game hunters thought that shooting an elephant with a rifle made them more manly somehow. The difference is with dog fighting there is cruelty, suffering, and painful death involved. If your ego demands you mutilate a dog, there’s something wrong. Go buy a big truck or something.

2. Innocence is presumed until found guilty. That makes it hard for the NFL to take any truly punitive action against Mr. Vick at the moment. However, if a professional bicycle racer is caught using steroids, they’re immediately banned from participation in the sport until the lab results come in. At least that’s the way I understand it… So can’t the NFL use that as a precedent for suspending Mr. Vick, without pay, until this is resolved? The trial date isn’t until November, but Mr. Vick’s alleged activities are certainly a detriment to the NFL’s image.

3. This is the big one for me. I heard someone say that Mr. Vick should go unpunished, as “he’s a hero to many children in Atlanta.” No, I hate to say it, but Mr. Vick is no hero. He’s a football player. He has no superpowers. He has sacrificed nothing. Pat Tillman, the NFL star who quit football and left a multimillion dollar contract in order to join the Army and subsequently died in Iraq, is a hero. Audy Murphy, the cowboy actor of the 1940s who left Hollywood to become the most decorated soldier in American history during WWII, is a hero. The man who works 60+ hours at the factory each week, then volunteers to help at the Soup Kitchen — he’s a hero. There are many, many heroes. Mr. Vick is not one of them.

Testicles in Iowa and Rocks in South Dakota

Last Saturday I went to Craig, Iowa (population 102) where they were having their annual Testicle Festival. Fun times! I shall leave the innumerable puns and double-entendres to those who will undoubtedly leave comments to this post, but let’s just say that any town council who says, “hey, lets go drink beer, roast some cow balls and have a parade” must be pretty cool…

On Sunday the American Legion Riders took a day to ride to Garretson, SD, where we had a picnic, went on a pontoon boat ride down the river a bit, and saw a gulch Jesse James allegedly jumped across with his horse whilst escaping the law. I took lots of pictures. After that, we went to the VA hospital in Sioux Falls and visited the recovering patients. One of our guys donated about 30 decks of playing cards, and someone else donated a bunch of books, so we handed those out to the veterans. I have some stories to tell about that, but work calls. I’ll write more later. In the meantime, here are some pictures…

Canning

Canning used to mean something different, at least here in Iowa. If someone said they were going to spend the afternoon canning, it mean they were going to be putting yummy tomatoes and other perishable foodstuffs from the garden into jars (oddly enough) so as to store them away for winter. My grandmother had rows and rows of canned food in jars in the basement.

These days if someone is going to spend the afternoon canning, it means they’re going to go out and root around in other people’s garbage cans in hopes of finding aluminum soda or beer cans, which they then take to the Can Center for the five-cent recycling deposit.

Many people in the neighborhood don’t like having homeless people going through their trash looking for cans. Quite a few businesses have “No Canning” signs up above their garbage cans and dumpsters. I hear people complaining about “the bums in the ditches” looking for cans. It’s not a pastime that makes a person popular.

There’s a homeless guy in our neighborhood that is very polite. He always smiles at people, but never starts those awkward conversations. He stops to pet the neighborhood dogs and cats. Nice guy. A few weeks ago I saw him coming up the street, pushing his shopping cart, so I went inside and gathered up our eight or ten empty cans for him to have. When I told Dagmar later that I’d given our cans to the guy, she thought that was a nifty idea. The next time the guy came by, a few days later, Dagmar went out and talked to him for a few minutes. I poked my head out the door and heard her tell the man, “We’ll just put our cans in the garage there every week, right around the corner where no one else can see them. You just go ahead and have them…. Yes, it’s okay, you can go in our garage for the cans, but only take the cans, and please don’t let your friends go in our garage. We trust you.”

That system has worked well for several months now… Whenever we get a few cans together we simply put them in the corner of the garage, and the homeless guy comes to pick them up when he goes canning on Mondays and Thursdays.

This morning I was out watering the new plants in our front yard when I saw the guy coming up the street. I ducked into the garage to get the cans for him and save the poor fella a few steps, but there were no cans there. I went back outside, caught his eye, shrugged and shook my head. He smiled at me and said, “Oh well, maybe Thursday,” and went on to go through the neighbor’s garbage. I turned back to watering the plants. After a few minutes I heard our new neighbor lady in the other house come outside.

“Uh oh,” I thought to myself. “I wonder what she’ll think of this guy going through the neighborhood trash.” I glanced over. She had three cans in her hands.

“Here,” she said to the homeless man. “You have these. There are only two empties, but this one’s full — I hope you like Diet Coke. If you ever get too hot, you just come on into our porch and sit down for a while, okay? Now you have a good day, and remember, if it gets hot, you can sit on our porch.”

I stood there, spraying my flowers, listening to the various things my brain was telling me, including:

“I need to think outside the box. Giving the guy empty cans is nice, but this lady is actually helping him. I need to do more.” and… “Hey, the neighbor lady doesn’t have any money herself — her and her husband are really struggling themselves.” and… “Wait a minute! Did the neighbor lady and her husband already take in a homeless guy? Isn’t that nice man who lives there with them a formerly homeless man?” I felt pretty bad about only giving the guy a few cans a week…

A few minutes later I went inside. “Honey,” I said, “Where are our empty cans? The nice homeless guy was here but there weren’t any cans in the garage.”

“Oh,” she said. “I gave them to the new neighbors. They don’t have much money.”

So we gave our empty cans to the someone in need, who in turn gave them to someone needier and went on to offer part of their home, even though they are already housing a person in need.

I like our neighbors. I need to learn things from them.

Vacation

We’ve been on vacation the last five days or so. Dagmar got bit by a poisonous spider, but she’s okay now. We went camping, but never spent the night outside ’cause it’s way too hot for that sort of thing. Now I’m tired.