-{The following is a post I wrote a while back. I was never really sure whether or not to bother posting it because I don’t know how interested y’all might be. So I figured that I would just hold on to it and maybe put it up if I ran out of content and was desperate for some material. However, DC Comics is releasing a series called DCU Decisions which will actually reveal the political leanings of the characters. Once that happens the speculation within this post is moot. So, if you don’t care the slightest about superheroes, comic books, and whatnot, feel free to skip over this. I won’t be offended.}-

Being a lapsed comic book nerd and an ongoing political geek, one of the things I ponder when trying to keep my mind busy (or awake) is how the two might intersect. Sometimes I develop ideas wherein the Democratic Party become the superhero-friendly party (because superheroes defend the powerless against the powerful) and sometimes the Republican Party does (because they support self-reliance and private action over government intervention). Sometimes I figure that superheroes would so change the political culture so greatly that nothing comparable to our two parties would even exist.

Sometimes, though, I just wonder to myself how Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne would vote if given the choices that we have. Not because I would emulate their vote, necessarily, but because I think such things help us understand the characters and because generally speaking the comic book publishers try to steer clear of assigning political (or religious) identification to the characters where it isn’t integral to the plot. This is a smart move because comic book writers often have the subtlety of a Mack truck and with relatively rare exception (Steve Ditko, Chuck Dixon) veer in one political direction: the left. If you ask the writers of the political orientation of the various superheroes, most will say that unless otherwise specified the heroes liberal or Democrat because in their mind the superheroes and Democrats are the good guys (notably, they erased the existence of Hawkman’s conservatism just recently). So doing what I do (preoccupy myself with pointless things like fictional US maps and politics and superheroes) I try to come up with it on my own.

So for better or worse, here’s what I’ve come up with: (more…)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post whining about my daily commute of 2-3 hours:

If you’re keeping track, that means that it takes me about 45 minutes to cover 35 miles of the commute and approximately 30 minutes to cover the other 6.

It stands to reason that right after writing it… it got worse. Considerably worse. The six mile tract became nine miles and instead of taking 40% of the commute it’s well over half. The “average” drive to the extent that there is one went up from 1:15 to about 1:30 and the number of days that it’s worse than that have gone up to once a week or so to at least twice a week.

The reason, I think, is that school got back in session. The full effects of this was masked the first couple of weeks by a teachers strike in New City and the fact that some of the local colleges started a little bit late.

Peter suggested (which I was already thinking) that I might just avoid the Splinterstate where all of the traffic is and instead go through the metropolis of Zaulem. I tried doing that but unfortunately it didn’t do a whole lot of good. At least I don’t think it did. There is a very, very helpful sign on I-3 on the drive up that tells me how many minutes it is to New City and how many to Zaulem. That actually gives me a heads up as to which route might be quicker. The Zaulem route has me going from Soundview (where I live) to Zaulem, Zaulem to New City, then New City to Enterprise where I work. I’ve determined that the trip from Zaulem to New City takes about 17 minutes or so. So if the difference on the light-distance sign is over 15 I go through Zaulem or otherwise I go straight on New City. I don’t know that it’s saving me time either way, but even if it’s not saving time the Zaulem route is more interested and switching routes punches up my routine a little, which is good.

It’s really strange to me how the window in the morning is some two or three hours of incomparable traffic hell wherein I honestly don’t know if leaving at 6:45 is any better or worse than leaving at 8:15 or at any point in between (though leaving at 7:30-45 does seem to be the worst)… and yet in the evening if I just wait for an extra hour the traffic is only a fraction as bad and I can usually make it home in an hour or so. Leaving right at the 5:00 bell is pretty bad, but it seems to get a lot better relatively quickly. On the other hand, the one day I left 90 minutes early (at 3:30), traffic was pretty awful. So it seems that the bulk of traffic hurts those that are getting there late and leaving early. Is Mindstorm (and/or any other employers in Enterprise) a company of get-there-late-leave-early slackers? Doesn’t seem to be, but that is what the traffic patterns would suggest.

What’s a little bit strange about that (to me) is that is contrary to my previous commuting experience. Usually it’s the drive home that’s worse than the drive to. It was 50% longer on my way home in Soyokaze in Estacado and Wildcat in Colosse. More often than not it’s about the same, though. This is the first time than the morning has been worse than the late afternoon.

A few months ago I took a trip to Colosse and my father and I babysat my little niece Sadie Lane Truman. Below are some pictures of the proud uncle and gramps!

	Baby looks off in interest at the world in front of her while she rides the lap of Grampa Trumwill. Little Sadie Lane is one of the most curious babies I’ve ever seen.
	Baby rests in the arms of her Uncle Trumwill. Neither know exactly what to do with this arrangement.
	Baby is registering her point of view that the world is just not the way that she would like it to be.
	The world has been deemed acceptably close to baby’s preferred state of affairs

There were three people that heavily influenced my decision to go to Southern Tech University: A particularly convincing recruiter, my ex-girlfriend Julie and my friend Hubert. Ironically, Julie convinced me prior to us dating or really knowing each other all that well. Her decision to go to Sotech - along with Hugh’s - reinforced the recruiter’s point that Sotech was not just a school for people that couldn’t get into or afford to go to a better school. Hubert actively pushed me to go to Sotech, though, by repeatedly telling me everything that it had to offer and why it would just be an awesome place for me to go.

Other than university pride, he had another motivation: He needed a roommate. Hugh was a year ahead of me and had already been going to the university. He was sharing a suite with a couple people that he really liked, but he hadn’t really hit it off with his actual roommate or maybe his roommate was transferring schools or something like that. I can’t honestly recall. Anyway, he and his suitemates had the idea of setting up all four beds in one room and then a separate room where all four could hang out. He needed a fourth person and I think from the moment I expressed that I might be interested in going to Sotech I became that candidate.

He and I were relatively casual friends mostly through BBSing.

I got the sense early on that both of us were cultivating our friendship in part because of the potential of becoming roommates. That’s not to say that we didn’t like each other, because we both did and had we gone to the same school he and I would likely have been pretty good friends if we’d happened to run in the same circles. But if I was going to Southern Tech I wanted the roommate situation squirreled away and he needed that fourth person, so a lot of talk drifted towards where I was going to school and him telling me what the best way to get into the Honors College was and things along those lines. By the time he and I actually met, he was already in “Hard Sell” mode.

Unfortunately, by the time I got to Sotech the other two roommates had found alternate living arrangements and so it was just the two of us suited up with a couple of loud athletes with whom we had little in common and barely got to know. The next year we moved into Greenwood Hall with the other students. We didn’t like our suitemates there, either, but we made a friend across the hall named Dennis. We were also cool with Dennis’s randomly assigned roommate, Saresh. So after a round of blackmail and intimidation, we managed to work it out so that we could have the four-person set-up that Hugh had originally sold me on. That fell apart after a year as my sloppiness and Hubert’s unsufferability got to the two of them, but we remained suitemates and friends.

Hugh was a lot more extroverted than I was, which actually served me well. He brought in a neverending stream of people to the dorm which included among other people Webmaster, John Fustle, and a guy named Karl.

I didn’t actual like Karl very much. In that way he was the opposite of Hugh. Hugh made a great first impression but would start to wear thin after a while, whereas Karl makes a terrible first impression but over time as you begin to understand him becomes more tolerable. As time wore on, my relationship with Hugh became increasingly strained to the point that as we were getting closer to graduation, I wanted to be as far away and as unlike him as humanly possible. I can’t remember how exactly I told him “No way in bloody hell” but I did get the point across that it wasn’t going to happen and he found another guy to room with.

The problem was that I had no idea where the hell I was going to live and with whom. My parents were expecting me to move back to Mayne, but for a number of reasons (both logistical and personal) I wasn’t open to that. But I was less open with living with Hugh any longer. And though I had a job, I didn’t have a good enough job that I could have afforded my own apartment. It was around then that I caught wind of Dennis (who was about to drop out of school) and Karl (who had been kicked out) talking about getting an apartment together. I was a little bit wary of rooming with the two of them because I didn’t much like Karl and things between Dennis and Karl had always been erratic (they were less than a month removed from being on non-speaking terms due to an argument that arose from a simulated wrestling league on the N64). I was desperate, though, so I brought up the idea of the three of us going in together. They were surprisingly receptive. Particularly Karl.

We hadn’t made much headway in our search when Hugh and his to-be roommate had concluded theirs. They found a shockingly affordable apartment complex on the west side of town. The complex itself wasn’t very nice, but it was in a decent part of town and was surrounded by nice complexes. Dennis, Hugh, and I were talking about it when Dennis and I began exchanging glances. He IMed me asking “Is living that close to him a price worth paying?” We decided that it was.

The apartment was about 1600 square feet and $720 a month. Utility bills were hell because of poor insulation, but it helped a lot that we were dividing it three ways. It worked out spectacularly well until (as expected) Karl and Dennis wore thin on one another. It was ironic that as the third wheel in this arrangement, I was the one that they eventually did all of their communication through after they refused to speak to one another after The Great Mighty Ducks 3 falling-out, from which they were never able to recover. Around that time Hubert also left that complex and bought a house. Web and a high school friend of his became his roommates.

Karl and I then struck out on our own, moving to a nicer complex in a nicer part of town. That worked out for a while, but rent when up 86% over a course of less than two years. We were looking for another apartment when Karl lost his job and I met Clancy and was going to be leaving the state entirely. He ended up moving in with John Fustle, who had also bought a house, while I temporarily moved back in with my folks. Unfortunately, before Clancy and I could get married and make our way out to Deseret, my parents and I had a falling out and I needed a place to stay. As it turned out, Fuzzles had an extra room in his house and Karl and I temporarily became roommates again. Interestingly enough, we were both working for Bregna at the time. I left Bregna and moved back in with my parents again a couple months and Karl moved out a while later to attend school full-time in another town. Web, having left Hugh’s when he got married, moved in at some point.

Karl and I were really great roommates I think in large part because we were both so private. He and I spent many late nights talking, but there was no awkwardness even when we went weeks without talking. Even though he had one of the more naturally irritating personalities, I managed to sync with him in a way that never rubbed me raw. Had Dennis not left in the middle of the night, he and I still wouldn’t have found the same equilibrium in part because he was increasingly becoming an emotional mess. I wasn’t sorry that he left town owing me $700 and a lease with Karl, but most of the problem I had with it was financial. Hugh and I have since made amends, though I think that’s in large part because we stopped living together.

I was at Costco the other day and saw that they were selling little biography DVDs of McCain and Obama. I thought about buying them because I really don’t know a whole lot about them outside their political careers. I didn’t end up doing it, though. Maybe next time. It did remind me that I’d gotten a hold of an audiobook copy of Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” book and that if I was going to listen to it I should do so before the election. So I’ve been listening to it on the commute.

I’m maybe 1/3 the way in and thus far it is absolutely phenomenal. I don’t even think it matters whether or not you care for Obama’s politics nor whether or not you believe a word of the book is true. Obama’s writing is terrific made even moreso by the fact that it was written before he was such a name and thus, as HalfSigma points out, was probably not actually ghost-written. Probably. The surprising (shocking, really) thing is, though, that if it were ghost written I totally know who wrote it: Orson Scott Card.

Okay, not really, but the resemblence in style is uncanny. They both use this sort of flowery language in this matter-of-fact sort of way. Concisely summarizing the human condition in order to make some relatively cursory explanation for a character’s behavior. Okay, so it’s a little hard to explain how they are so similar except that they just are. A couple times I had to remind myself that General Graf was not going to show up in Indonesia and help Barack’s step-father train Barack how to fight.

The book is read by Obama and the voice even sounds like one of the main guys from the Ender series. Though that may influence the connection, it’s definitely more than that. Obama also read a short introduction at the beginning. I was amazed at how stale his voice was during that part. I was getting worried that the entire book would be that stiff and dispassionate. Once he got into the novel itself, though, it got a lot better. In addition to being a skilled orator, he’s an impressive actor (insert joke here) taking on various accents and intonations as well as (if not better than) any of the other audiobook readers that I’ve been listening to.

Turns out that the credit agency still had more stuff to send us and they did. Unfortunately, not a whole lot helpful information. The Risk Assessment Agency (RAA) has (allegedly) sent us everything that they sent Homefront Insurance except for our actual credit score. Most of what we’ve found out is what we already know:

My credit rating is pretty good. Clancy’s is slightly less good, but nothing in keeping with a 25% jump in auto insurance rates.

Clancy’s driving record is perfect. Homefront did not get get my driving record from RAA as they did hers, but they may have a different channel for existing customers.

There are no claims against Clancy. There are a couple things on my history that could be responsible. For some reason their report says that I had a lapse in insurance coverage, which I didn’t and Homefront knows that because I’ve been insured with them since I started driving. It also lists my having made a couple claims on my car, but those were actually claims made by my father, whose name is also William Truman, so maybe that’s contributing. In any case, these are things that Homefront is already aware of.

If this is a case of identity theft, there’s no indication of it. I don’t know if there is a “subfile” like Web mentions in a previous comment section, but the RAA is supposed to be turning over everything that they got from the credit bureau except the score. If there’s something negative on our record, they are obligated by state (and maybe federal) law to let us know what it is.

Clancy has substantial debt from medical school. If they’re penalizing her for that I’m going to be rather pissed. Of all the things to borrow money on, medical school is one of the best bets there is. Better than law school, better than generic student loans, better than business loans, and these days a lot better than home loans.

Still nothing to justify a 25% hike, unless it’s the Spitstorm ticket. I just wish that I could get some sort of clear answer as to what it is that’s hurting us. I don’t need formulas, but for goodness sakes they’re obviously very concerned about something and form letters listing tons and tons of things that it might be aren’t doing the trick.

There were some things that I didn’t know:

I have an account with Discover that I am entirely unaware of. Somewhere between $25-50 a month is being used on the account, but it’s being paid every month.

None of my credit card companies have reported my late payments to the credit bureau. All of them claim that I have never been late. I’m not frequently late, but I definitely have been late a couple times due to simple absent-mindedness.

For some reason they think that I lived in the town that Clancy went to medical school in. Same street address as one of the places that we lived in Deseret, just in Delianapolis.

I made my calendar last night to make sure that I caught hold of all the TV shows that I’m going to try watching this season. There are fourteen shows that I will be watching this fall season.

I discovered something interesting. Of the fifteen shows that I will be watching this fall season, half (seven) come on Monday nights*, almost a third (four) come on Thursday nights**, and the remainder (three) come on the other five days of the week***.

Thursday nights are historically a good night for television, but Monday? Is that a historically popular night for television? I have difficulty thinking of historically popular shows that come on that night. Maybe it’s a product of Monday Night Football going over to ESPN?

* - TheBig Bang Theory, Boston Legal****, Chuck, Heroes, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, and Worst Week
** - Eleventh Hour, Life on Mars, My Name Is Earl*****, and The Office
*** - Dirty Sexy Money, Fringe, Life
**** - I swore up and down at the end of last season that I was finished with this show, but given how the upcoming season is the last one and I’ve already invested a whopping 12 seasons into The Practice and Boston Legal, it’s tough to quit this close to the end
***** - It’s on probation. If it hasn’t improved by the end of Fall, I’ll probably move on

But I did it. Not only did I do it, but I did it with style. Southern Style. Very southern. I practically made it a country song, which ironically it worked reasonably well as (Matchbox Twenty themselves would later release a countrified version of the song on their VH1 Storytellers DVD). The funny thing is that I never had the slightest intention of singing with an accent. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. It just came out that way. It certainly never would have won me any record deals, but it worked.

In fact, the second song I did actually won me compliments from strangers. Less for my voice and more for my stage presence (an irony completely unto itself), but I was at least able to distract them with my unexpected accent and stage antics to the point that they didn’t notice or care that I couldn’t keep a pitch to save my life.

So sometime in college I started picking up an accent. Some of it was just by exposure. I was dating Julie who came from a blue collar background. I was in a college at the University with higher-than-usual proportions of classmates with more modest and less urban backgrounds. I was listening to country music for the first time. A bunch of things like that.

Some of it, though, was intentional. Starting in late high school I started looking for things that I did that were alienating people and things I could due to more ably fit in. One of the things I determined was that my speech was too structured. I have cultivated the occasional propensity to use unnecessarily elongated terminology which some people found off-putting.

I can’t always help the words that I use, but I found that people responded more friendly when I spoke in a more disarming tone. Some might call this “speaking down”, but to me part of communication is keeping in mind how something will be received. If anyone had suggested that I was being condescending or anything of the like, I certainly would have stopped. Nonetheless, I think that on the overall it helped me gel better with Julie’s extended family, with which I was not naturally inclined to gel.

I also started using it in another context, though. This one I discovered completely by accident. I’ll get into how I discovered it another time, but I basically noticed that I could sidestep the nervousness that comes from speaking in front of large groups by sort of taking on a persona. Speaking as Will Truman I would be self-conscious. But for some reason being someone other than my most immediate self helped me cope with being nervous.

So when I had to do a speech in front of a college class or something like that, I would speak with a bit of an accent. Or on the rare occasions that I tried to make the acquaintance of a girl that I did not know, the accent would pop up again. I’m not really sure why it worked like it did. Maybe my “being somebody else” I could attribute the awkwardness to my persona rather than to myself. That explanation is odd, though, because I’ve never thought of myself as anything but awkward.

Or maybe it’s a recognition of my weaknesses. I am not a First Impression Guy. I’m a Third Impression Guy. The first impression most people have of me is that I am quiet and distant. I actually almost named this blog after that tendency on my part. I managed to actually shake this in college for a while, but it came back eventually. So I was sort of outsourcing the First Impressions to a sort of alternate self. Someone much more enthusiastic to talk about football, the hotness of conventionally attractive women, and so on.

None of this is to suggest that I was completely selling myself out. I wasn’t. My real personality comes through with repeated exposure. Sometimes I keep things like my politics and religion pretty close to my chest and sometimes I keep up with sports just so that I can talk about them, but for the most part the people I become good friends with are the people that are most like or most compatible with myself. That means other unconventional people like me. People without an accent, more often than not.

Having moved away from Delosa, I find myself using the accent less and less. I used it in part because of how it came across in the south. It comes across differently in Deseret, Cascadia, and so on. Rather than making people more comfortable it only reminds them that I’m different. At least that’s what I think. I remember a coworker at Falstaff who had a pretty significant Tennassee accent and it just felt entirely different there than it would have felt in Colosse.

I am one of those people that gets nervous when speaking in front of large groups of people. In college I was expected to do that on more than a few occasions.

If you got an hour to spare, I cannot recommend this episode of Bloggingheads.tv with Mark Kleiman and Megan McArdle enough. It’s from last year, but very little on it is dated (except a Supreme Court ruling, I think). There are like ten things that they said or discussed that I want to write a post about. They talk about drugs, guns, gambling, and a host of other things. It’s not so much what they talk about but the absence of bickering in favor of actual discussion. It let me with a whole lot to chew on on a number of topics.

Ever since Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was tapped to be John McCain’s running mate, there has been a torrent of criticisms with varying degrees of legitimacy. Some, such as her (alleged) history of using the governor’s office to reward friends and associates are quite legitimate to at least investigate pretty thoroughly. Others, such as her daughter’s pregnancy and the dubious claim about her being anti sex-ed or slashing funding for single mothers have shaky foundations but are important issues if true. Some, though, are rank speculation based on medical impossibilities and/or conspiracy theories that defy the interests of even those allegedly participating in the theory. Namely the notion that Sarah Palin’s youngest child, Trig, is not actually Sarah Palin’s at all but rather her daughter’s. That’s what I’m going to be looking at in this post.

I’m going to provide a little more of my personal views for context. I don’t want to get into a debate about the merits of these vies, but rather I want you to know where I stand so that you can take that into account as I defend the would-be vice president. I am not a Sarah Palin fan. Her inclusion on the Republican ticket has made me less rather than more comfortable with the prospect of a McCain presidency. I consider her grossly unqualified for the job that she seeks; I consider her selection an incredibly cynical political move; I am disturbed that this cynicism was so successful. I also believe, however, that a lot of the attacks thrust upon her are rather unfair and practically invited the culture war maneuvering of the GOP since her selection. Agree with me or disagree with me on the above points, I don’t really want to get into it. I just don’t want this post to be considered an endorsement of her candidacy. Hit Coffee is not a political blog and it endorses nobody (including Obama-Biden).

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Grandmother Palin theory advanced by HalfSigma, DailyKos, Andrew Sullivan, and countless others. If you are, you can skip this paragraph, but otherwise it basically goes like this: Bristol Palin became pregnant some time last year. When Sarah and Todd Palin discovered this, they embarked on a coverup claiming that Sarah was the one that was pregnant and that the child was hers. Before you say that this theory is too outlandish on its face, I would point out that this sort of thing used to happen back in the days when there was a serious stigma against single mothers. There are also a number of oddities pertaining to the Palin marriage which lend some credence to the theory. Sarah Palin told nobody about her pregnancy until late in the term and she didn’t start showing until unusually late in the pregnancy. She was unusually active for a woman with a Down Syndrome baby even somewhat late in the pregnancy. She started labor in Texas and made a point to fly thousands of miles back to Alaska so that she could have the baby there (or, ahem, appear to have the baby there). Bristol, meanwhile, did appear to some to be pregnant both in photos (some of which have been discredited) and by some friends. Bristol also switched schools about the time that she would have been showing which was a rather common maneuver in yesteryear to cover a pregnancy. Bristol also allegedly got a ticket for taking an illegal turn into a hospital with OB services.

So in short, the theory was not entirely speculative or without merit. There are possible legitimate explanations for all of the above, but it’s such a juicy theory. I can’t say that I actually bought into it, and honestly it wouldn’t have affected my opinion of her even if it were true (yes, it was a coverup, but it actually a sort of admirable on in its own right), but I could understand that the sheer juiciness of it (as well as Palin’s contentious political views) would lead some to lend more credibility to it than it maybe deserved. However, as far as I was concerned, that theory came crashing down the minute that they announced that Bristol was five months pregnant at the beginning of this month. Even though I hadn’t done the math, the likelihood of back-to-back pregnancies seemed pretty remote. But not everyone saw it the way that I did and the speculation has continued unabated ever since. Oddly, though, I haven’t even seen the back-to-back pregnancy issue even addressed. I kept wondering if maybe there was something I was missing about the way that pregnancy works that makes it more possible than I previously thought.

So the other night I sat down with Clancy, my wife with an MD and significant labor and delivery experience, and we went over the dates. Clancy had been pretty dismissive of the theory at the start, but I wanted to know that however unlikely, was it even possible that Bristol Palin could become pregnant again so quickly. The answer is that if Bristol Palin was five months pregnant on September 1, it is impossible that she gave birth on April 18, when Trig Palin was born.

Irish Twins are pretty rare even in natalist countries. Even in Deseret, where it was not that uncommon for women to have two, three, or four babies in as many years, it was extremely rare that they were born within a calendar year of one another. Women generally don’t hop right back into bed and try to conceive (or to have sex without conceiving) right after giving birth. Even if they are enthusiastic about having a lot of children in a short period of time, their bodies have to recover first. My wife and most doctors recommend 6 weeks at least and most women simply aren’t in the frame of mind to start again before that (or until well after that, actually). For Bristol in particular, having gone through an unwanted pregnancy and presumably not wanting another, it’s likely that she would want any sex she was having to be protected (the same way that adherence to contraception becomes a lot stronger for any couple after an unwanted pregnancy scare).

The other complicating factor for the theory is that ovulation does not begin for most women (that doesn’t breast-feed) after pregnancy until 45 days after childbirth. The earliest that it occurs is 25 days after childbirth. If she breastfeeds, those numbers go up pretty dramatically, but in any case the minimum is 25 days. Since Trig was born on 4/18, that means that the earliest ovulation would have been 5/13. Keep in mind that this assumes all of the following:

Bristol was not breastfeeding.
Bristol had sex within 4 weeks of giving birth.
Bristol happened to have sex while she was ovulating.
Bristol happened to get pregnant upon having sex despite having much-more-than-usual motivation to use protection and despite the fact that her parents were probably watching her comings-and-goings a little more closely.

So let’s say that for the sake of argument we assume all four of the above and she got pregnant on or around 5/13. Because she didn’t have any periods after having given birth, the doctors would need to date the baby with an ultrasound. Upon looking at the ultrasound what they’d find is that the new baby is consistent with a baby dated back to 4/29 or so. Baby dating begins on a woman’s last period. Bristol didn’t have one, but her baby’s development would be consistent with that of a woman that did have a period on 4/29 or so.

On September 1, they announced that she was five months (22 weeks) pregnant. If true, that would mean that the dating began at the beginning and not the end of April and that the baby was quite likely conceived at the time or shortly before its grandmother went into labor. If the baby was conceived at the earliest possible Grandmother Theory date of 5/13, it would have been four and not five months pregnant at the time the announcement was made. That’s beyond the scope of ultrasound error and frankly its beyond the scope of which the Palins would be able to fudge the date without inevitably being exposed down the line.

The new kid is due at the end of December. If the baby was conceived on 5/13, which would put it at a maximum of 36 weeks at the turn of the year, which is too early for the baby to come out. So in order to make it legit, they would be risking the baby’s life in order to cover a political point and they would have to be willing to find a doctor willing to risk losing his license by such a reckless deliver. On the other hand, if conceived on 5/13, it would not be due until the beginning of February. That would raise a lot of eyebrows because that’s after 42 weeks, which is the point that they induce labor and/or pull the baby out if it doesn’t want to come out willingly. A baby being allowed to stay in the womb to 44 weeks wouldn’t fly. Not to mention that the baby might actually be late coming out, which could push it to 46 week.

In short, if they’re lying about the due date, they’re almost certain to be exposed. Yes, that would be after the election, but Palin presumably wants to be president herself some day. This is not a good means to that end. Particularly when copping to a mid-May conception would still strongly support their contention that Trig is Sarah’s and not Bristol’s because it would rely on the aforementioned irregularities.

The other possibility is that Bristol isn’t actually pregnant right now and that it’s just a ruse so that people like me will disregard The Grandmother Theory. Word is, though, that Bristol’s pregnancy was a pretty open secret in Alaska. It’s also a pretty elaborate ruse that’s going to have to come to head at one point of another. I might be willing to revisit this theory if there’s a miscarriage, but it relies on a whole lot of people being quiet about something that the National Enquirer would pay a handsome amount of money to hear testimony on.

Which is the last problem with all of these theories. We’ve got doctors and hospitals that are chalk full of people, many presumably Democrats and all of them living in a small town the type of which information travels really fast, and it’s extremely difficult to believe that they’re all in on this theory.

A couple other things, while I’m at it.

Some hay has been made about Sarah Palin’s choice to have her baby delivered by a family practitioner rather than an OB/GYN. I can understand why that might raise some eyebrows, but it’s really not that suspicious at all. My wife is a baby-delivering family doctor very much the sort that delivered Palin’s baby. Some regions of the nation (such as the northeast) are very inhospitable to the idea of non-specialists delivering babies, but Alaska is not one of them. You would be amazed at how many job opportunities there are in Alaska that would not only allow Clancy to deliver babies but also to perform C-Sections. Though there are certainly specialists out there and given that it’s a Down Syndrome baby maybe it would have been wise for the governor to see a specialist, but it’s not at all surprising that she made the choice that she did. It’s something of the norm out there.

Also, some are suggesting that Palin’s decision to have an amniocentesis. If Sarah Palin is so pro-life, then why did she have the test when it’s known to cause miscarriages? The implication is that either she did not have an amnio or that she was reckless and un-pro-life for doing so. The latter reasoning is undercut by the fact that they had the baby despite getting the bad news The risks of miscarriage with an amniocentesis are assumed to be a lot higher than they are. Only a fraction of a percent of amnios cause miscarriages. Second, amniocentesis are not procedures merely meant to filter out babies with defects. The Palins had Down Syndrome and they chose to bring it to term anyway. Clancy and I have already decided that if she gets pregnant with a baby with Downs then we’ll keep it. But if she’s over 35 when she’s pregnant, we’re going to get tested. Partly because if you’re going to have a baby with Down Syndrome it’s helpful to know that in advance so that you can plan for it. Also, and less frequently discussed, amnios can find problems a lot more serious than Down Syndrome. Problems that are, as doctors say, incompatible with life. In other words, they could find out that the kid is not going to be born.

None of this is to argue that Palin would be a good (or bad) vice president or that she is a good person or good mother on the whole. This really isn’t about the politics of it at all. I’ve just been getting increasingly frustrated with some of the conspiracy-mongering that is divorced from the facts on the ground. Contrary facts aren’t even explained away; they’re not addressed at all. I haven’t even heard people explaining how the back-to-back pregnancies are possible by suggesting that the Palins are lying about the pregnancy or the due date. I’ve had to assume what their arguments might be. I’ve commented on at least a couple of places with the above information and nobody has told me where I’m wrong. Nobody has even responded. Lest anyone think that I convinced them, they continue to post more and more about how this is a legitimate line of inquiry because of some of the oddities surrounding Trig’s term. Unless someone can point to an error above, it’s simply not a line of inquiry and no amount of “suspicious circumstances” can simply explain away what is medically impossible. The Palins do not have to turn over their medical records (as many have suggested is their obligation) to prove anything.

Addendum: I remembered after posting this that Clancy was supposed to review it before I put it up, but I forgot to show it to her. So while she was the source of a lot of information on this, it is based primarily on my interpretation of what she’s had to say and she does has not read this for its accuracy. However, this post is based on an extended comment made in this comment on Half Sigma.

If you’re like me, you wonder about various things.

Things such as… “I wonder if Ramen goes bad”

Or “How long have we had this Ramen?”

Or “That little label thing that says 121805SB couldn’t possibly be referring to Sell By December 18, 2005, could it?”

If you’re like me and you wonder about these things, the following answers come up in the form of a day of burped-up pasta and other particles:

Yes.

Roughly three years.

It could indeed.

My great friend Kyle has an older sister named Kelly. When Kyle and I first became friends, Kelly was kind of a non-entity. She was never really around and they had the rather typical brother/sister incompatibilities. On top of that, she had a boyfriend/fiance of several years (since she was 13 and he 17) that had the inclination to dominate her social life.

Once she moved away to go to college (and broke the engagement off), though, they naturally became closer. Whenever she was in town, she would often join us for our jaunts to IHOP or whatever else. The same was true whenever we would go to Ephesus. She and I traded instant messages somewhat regularly and formed a loose friendship even apart from her brother.

She excelled at being free from the ex-fiance. She was very attractive with a very engaging personality to a certain kind of guy (the kind of guys that inevitably choose to live in college towns). She dated a lot. At one point she was dating a member of a hot local band. I use the word “member” loosely. While the band played, he stood on stage and juggled and swallowed flames. He seemed right up her alley. He was also big into polyamory, which she was uncertain about at first but she seemed to revel in the freedom for a while until she got together with some other musician-sort.

She and I would sometimes get together when I’d go back to Delosa, but around the time I moved to Estacado she moved to Cascadia. It seemed that she had met the guy of her dreams and she left a $70k/year job on a lark because he wanted to move to Zaulem to… well no particular reason. He just thought that would be a better place to be and he wanted her to go with him. Kyle was distressed at the degree to which she was willing to making such important life decisions on a man’s account, but I argued that she had become a pretty independent person.

I saw her again at Kyle’s wedding (Kyle was, by that point, living in Estacado). I was greatly looking forward to seeing her again. It’d been too long. There was also the matter that she had a job with the technology giant Mindstorm. Since I knew Mindstorm wouldn’t be interested in me, I was actually more interested with the placement agency that she’d hooked up with and hoped that said agency might be able to help me get a job somewhere. I figured that we’d have plenty of time to talk about it between the wedding, reception, and all that.

When I saw her at the wedding, I suddenly understood Kyle’s concern. She was never more than five feet away from him. She waved “hi” across the room but there was no customary hug and she and I never talked. In fact, she spent 90% of the time talking just to him. She started to try to introduce him around but he started become agitated with something and they basically ended up talking by themselves in the corner with him wearing a “Do not disturb” look on his face. It was the first time she’d seen her family in over six months and the first time she’d seen a lot of the guests in years. But it was apparently more important to him that she keep him entertained.

It was all quite sad.

Since finding out she works on the same floor in the same building as I do, part of me wants to go over and say “hi”, though I have this odd feeling that her boyfriend might not approve (not that I would have posed any threat even when I was single, much less now that I’m not) or that it would be inappropriate somehow. Maybe he isn’t the bad guy at all and she was just ready to move on to a different phase in her life.

Eh. I’d rather blame him.

I was recently talking to someone that was thinking about moving to Colosse, the southern city in which I was raised. I warned him about the heat and the hurricanes and all manner of things, but he would not be deterred. Which I think is great. I loved Colosse and it still hurts to have left it sometimes.

I gave him a piece of advice when looking for a home that I think a lot of people from colder climates don’t always appreciate: If you’re looking at buying a house in the places with hot climates, make sure that you know the score on the swimming pool situation. I didn’t realize until I moved to Deseret that there were places that swimming pools weren’t de facto family civic centers.

I was raised in a neighborhood with a free swimming pool with no membership required. Other neighborhoods had annual pool fees, which were invariably worth it if you had kids. Others, though, had waiting lists. Those are deadly. Imagine your kid being excluded from playing with his friends because they all want to go to the pool and your kid can’t. And you can’t mitigate this by having a swimming pool in the back yard. Not unless you have a high dive*, a low-dive, a 20ft “deep end”**, and room for fifty or so.

The pool in the neighborhood that I was raised and in neighborhoods surrounding it was more than just a place that you could go and swim. It was, as mentioned above, a civic center of sorts. It was free babysitting. A place for kids to go, expend all their energy, and then come home. By and large, over the summer the pool took school’s place as the most important place in my life outside the home… and I wasn’t even a swimmer-type person the way that my wife was when she was younger.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of people from colder climates where pools are not so universal (because you can only swim in them a couple months of the year) don’t realize the importance of the swimming pool and find out too late that they’ve landed somewhere where their kid can’t go to the pool every day.

* - High dives were mostly taken out of public pools a couple decades ago, which just makes me angry. Insurance and lawsuits and all that. I remember how excited I was when I found a place with a high dive in Deseret. Man that was a thrill. A greater thrill at 28 than I think it was at 12.

** - I hear deep-ends are insurancially problematic as well. More’s the tragedy on that.

Regular Hit Coffee readers know that I am an evangelist for ThinkPads. The quality of the computers I’ve gotten has been so great that I don’t even bother to buy their stellar throw-it-off-a-cliff warranties. The customer service is of course unsurpassed to the extent that they are the one company that I believe will actually solve my problem whenever I call them.

I do have one bone to pick with them, however. They have such a great product… but they make it hard to get one sometimes with their Not-In-Time inventory system. I don’t think that I am alone in this regard. In fact, I know that I’m not alone. My friend Kyle’s employer bought a whole fleet of ThinkPads and ThinkCentres only to have one delay after another and after three months they negated the contract and went with HP. My father-in-law had a similar issue where he ordered it and two months later it hadn’t arrived and so he cancelled the order.

I’ve personally had two experiences with this. First, when I got the most recent laptop in our possession we were about to move from Deseret to Estacado. Unfortunately the other laptop had died and I needed something quickly. So naturally ThinkPad cited 6-8 weeks as the likely delivery time when by that point I’d be in Estacado and having it wouldn’t be nearly so important.

They made up for it, though. At first they tried to sell me something that was a little more than I needed for a lot more than I wanted to spend, but since I was desperate I agreed. Then they called me back ten minutes later with a way that I could get what I wanted and actually spend less than I had initially intended to (it only required that I put the RAM in myself and get a different battery than I wanted to). So they actually made up for the whole affair by giving me something resembling what I wanted, if not exactly, in the time that I wanted it.

And now it’s happened again. I ordered my laptop from them and had been counting down the days until it was set to ship. Then, the count reached zero, I went to the website to see what the arrival date might be… and discovered that the shipping date had been pushed back two weeks. Once again, though, the customer service helped mitigate the inconvenience by shedding as much light on the problem as they could. They were able to tell me precisely what part was causing the delays. Once again it turned out to be the power supply. They told me that I could change my order to get it out to be sooner, but he said that if I could just sit tight for a couple days it was likely that they’d be able to find one before the new estimated shipping date.

And so they did. Further, to repay me for the inconvenience of the delay, they express-shipped it. Since the port-of-entry into the US is Zaulem, it literally arrived at my doorstep the day after they sent it (from Hong Kong) and before it would have with UPS Ground had they shipped it on the original date.

But while I appreciate the lengths that they go to in order to please me, I have to ask why this problem keeps arising. If the power supplies are such a problem, why not have a few more of them around? Obviously they’re not keeping up with demand when both times I’ve had delays that was a cited reason for it. It all worked out well with me, but Kyle’s employer and my father-in-law are customers that they either lost or almost lost because most people aren’t as patient as I am.

The complaints aside, holy cow is it an awesome laptop! Because a friend helped me get a particularly good deal I upgraded the video and I honestly did not know that the video on a laptop could look so good. I was worried about having to get widescreen and how that might hurt visibility but when the resolution is 1680-by-1050 and crystal clear. The writing is tiny and yet completely readable, which means that I can read full-page digital comic books on that laptop that I can’t on my wife’s laptop which is actually taller.

The whole downgrade-to-XP was a little bit tougher than anticipated, though and ended up taking several hours and ultimately cost me my copy of Vista. I goofed up and zapped the Vista operating system without having a backup. ThinkPads don’t have restore CDs. What they do have is just as good… except in special cases like this. Then I had to figure out which of the three CDs did what to get XP on there. I eventually got there. It would have been sooooo much easier if I’d simply installed a pirated copy of XP on there, though.

That’s really one of the biggest problems with Microsoft’s copy protection… they make going illegit not only cheaper, but easier.

A day or two back I wrote about my struggles with my insurance provider possibly regarding our credit check. If you want the backstory, go read that post. If you’ve read the post, you can skip the next paragraph.

The shorter version is this: our insurance rates went up 25% between the quote and the rate’s implementation and we were pointed to Clancy’s credit score (which was fine six months ago) as the reason why, though it could be because of an awful ticket I got a couple months ago but through a loophole I have reason to believe that my insurance company (Homefront Insurance Co.) doesn’t know about.

The most frustrating thing to me is the opacity of it all. I want to know why my insurance rates went up 25% and it’s been a month and I have not been able to get an answer. Granted, some of that is because of my own opacity (my not wanting them to find out about the ticket), but only part. Since Clancy’s credit rating was checked six months ago we have to pay out-of-pocket for any inquiries that we want to make.

On the face of it, credit ratings are a great idea. Whether we owe people money or have problems making monthly payments is definitely of interest to businesses that want to extend us credit either of the explicit nature (cash advance, loans, etc) or implicit nature (something requiring regular payments that it’s difficult to turn off and on like utilities). Having that information collected in a place that’s easy for businesses to access is a good thing.

At the same time, it seems as though credit ratings are based as much on probability as they are on history. If someone has people checking on their history, they probably are seeking credit elsewhere and are more risky, so a person is hurt even if that’s not at all the case. If a person is seen as having too many or two few credit accounts, he is seen as risky because he could be stocking up on credit or might be unable to know how to make monthly payments like a credit pro can.

And unfortunately, these numbers are used for far more than just obtaining credit and in ways that affect our lives more generally (car insurance and even employment). That’s one of the parts that has me worried. Homefront isn’t worried that I won’t be able to make my payments. I’ve made them without fail for ten years. Even if I volunteer to pay the entire six-month term in one bulk payment, we’re still penalized. Part of me wants to say how unfair this is, though the other part of me says that it’s the same rationale that they used in order to give me an insurance break because of my good grades in college and that didn’t seem unfair at the time. As with credit, insurance companies use probability (gender, age group, grades, credit scores) as much as history, though it makes more sense in their line of work than in credit agencies.

If it is about our credit rating, though, I’m actually less worried about paying more for insurance for a while than I am about what this is going to mean down the road. There is a huge black cloud that may be following us around and no one has to tell us what it is without extracting some sort of penalty either in the form of further hurting our insurance rating or just costing us money.

I don’t want to turn this into a political post, though I have to go there at least a little. This is one area where the government set out to protect consumers and as near as I can tell actually protected consumers. The fact that we are able to get our annual credit reports is due to a law being passed, as are the requirements of how information is corrected. Unfortunately, none of that is enough to stop some of the current methodology from being a pain in the arse.

I’m not sure how much I will be posting on Mindstorm on the whole since it’s such a high-profile place that’s extremely concerned with security, but here are a few tidbits that I don’t think give anything away.

Periodically I get a message on my computer at work that says something about Mindstorm wanting me to update my software. When I get this message I have to ask… Wait, which Mindstorm? Mindstorm the vendor of the software that I am using or Mindstorm the entity that pays the entity that pays the entity that pays my bills? It kinda makes a difference as to how aggressively I respond.

Last week I learned how to use an Apple Macbook. I kind of find of… unexpected… that I go my entire life not knowing how to use Mac’s OSX and then learn how to use a Macbook at this particular job for this particular company.

I knew that I would get to work with a lot of cool things when I signed on to work where I do. I figured the latest gadgets and doodads. I have not been disappointed nor surprised by what I’ve found. Except for the fact that I use, on a daily basis, floppy disks and serial cables.

Working for Mindstorm is bad for the waistline. It’s not actually as bad as it was at Falstaff, though, where there was a free coke fountain. Here we have free cans of coke. Everything from Mountain Dew to V8 to milk. It’s rather hard to limit myself, though unlike with a fountain it’s easier to keep track of how much I’ve had to drink and thus easier to convince myself not to have another. Plus, Mindstorm stocks Diet Mountain Dew! And skim milk! The local grocery store doesn’t even always stock those two things.

It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly awful the parking habits of Mindstorm employees (and maybe Cascadians in general) are. Every day in the parking garage I see some car that’s parked illegally. They’re parked in a non-spot or, in some cases, use their 4-wheel drive to go onto a walkway and park there. As if that’s not bad enough, it’s made worse by being completely unnecessary! My building always has sufficient parking! I’ve never seen the lowest level full. Not once!

What can you say about a company that spends hundreds of dollars developing and producing specialty hardware so that you don’t have to get off your butt to turn computers on and off… but then drags its feet when you need a thumb drive or ask for rechargeable batteries (that would actually save the company company)?

I used to curse when it seemed like every Case I got to test was complicated and weird. Then I realized that the uncomplicated and unweird Cases have all been shipped off to outsourcing operations in Asia and I stopped cursing and became rather thankful for those Cases that couldn’t be easily replicated.

When Clancy and I moved to Cascadia, one of our goals was to start getting things transferred into “us” accounts rather than “Will Accounts” and “Clancy Accounts.” One of the ways that we’re doing that is to finally merge our automobile insurance. Clancy initially wanted to go with her insurance company, Salamander, though I wanted to stick with Homefront, which I’ve been with for ten years and has always treated me reasonably well (I think insurance companies generally do treat long-term customers better rather than newer customers because the latter are likely to be the unloyal sort of customer that hops around from place to place depending on the best deal at any given time. My parents have always gotten stellar service from Homefront, with whom they’ve been since the 70’s).

So I stopped by the local Homefront and we worked up our insurance rates, which turned out to be about the same for both of us as they were for us independently in Estacado. So we decided to go ahead and get everything auto (liability, collision, comprehensive, uninsured motorist, etc) as well renter’s insurance for the total quote of about $150 a month.

Flash forward a few weeks and we get our Declarations in the mail and everything changes. I’m a somewhat well-educated guy but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the information that they were sending us other than that it was going to cost us a lot more money. Somewhere between $210-260 a month depending on what exactly the documents were saying (was the listed premium for a six month period or the remaining four months of the current six month period… things like that).

I would have just attributed it to them finding out about my traffic ticket, except that a separate piece of mail from Homefront gave us a very different impression. Essentially, what it said was that the rates were affected by a consumer risk rating, something similar to a credit rating used primarily by insurance companies. At the bottom it said that it was affected by Clancy’s. As luck would have it we checked Clancy’s credit less than six months ago (when we were getting our current apartment) and it was fine. So I went down to Homefront’s office to ask what the deal was and why she might have gotten a sour risk rating when six months ago we were fine.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much that they could tell us other than to help me understand the documents and find out that the monthly payment was actually $195. They asked if we had any claims against us or if we had credit problems and neither of those things are true. We don’t have too many credit accounts and don’t owe anyone except student loan organizations money. We do have a few black marks on late payments, but never enough to hurt our credit too badly and besides I have never had a late payment to Homefront in over a decade. Of course it’s not that simple. It’s somewhat well-known that insurance companies know that people with good credit are statistically likelier to get into less accidents than people with bad credit. Even so, why would a sour credit rating (that shouldn’t even be that sour) make our ratings shoot upwards 25%? Particularly when one driver has a perfect driving record and the other driver (as far as I know that they know) has one 10mph speeding ticket in the last five years and none in the last three?

And of course I can’t ask them directly whether my driving record suddenly had a huge black mark on it in the form of a 26mph speeding ticket in Real-life Wyoming. My figuring up until that point was that because I got my Cascadian driver’s license prior to RL Wyoming assessing my fine and forwarding the info to the Estacado DMV that unless they went back and checked Estacado specifically that I might have gotten away with it. This was telling me that maybe I didn’t, though as I said I couldn’t directly ask without drawing attention to things I don’t want attention drawn towards.

There were two things, though, that made me question whether it was the ticket. First is that all of the documentation they sent me told me that recent changes were reflected by Clancy’s consumer risk rating and none made even a cursory mention that “If you’ve recently gotten any traffic tickets…” The second is that it’s quite possible that if they did find out about that ticket, that my rates would have gone higher. Just to check, I went to Salamander’s website and saw what they would have charged us (with the ticket that I think they would have find out about). The answer was that they would start at $210 with basic liability and go up from there and I didn’t even bother to see what it would have been to get the full coverage that I was getting at Homefront.

So we were basically going to be stuck with Homefront, so all we had left to do was find out why we were considered so risky. My driving record or something in her credit? And if it was something on her credit, was it something genuine and stupid (like student loan debts), something genuine and troublesome (some complaint filed against us in Estacado that we don’t know about), or something erroneous. We had a little reason to believe it was the latter because my agent said that one area for concern would be if a married couple live at different addresses and Clancy and I have two different addresses on our driver’s license.

My Homefront Agent called the Risk Assessment Agency (RAA) to ask them to review my account. We waited about a week to hear back from them and when we did they said that they were standing by their numbers. Still no indication as to how they arrove at them. Obviously they can’t tell us the formula because that’s proprietary, but just a summation of what hurt us would have helped. A couple days later we got something from Homefront that said that if we had any questions how we could get our report from the RAA.

It was a long two weeks waiting for that result. Then, when we got it, it told us nothing at all. All they sent us was her driving record, which was spotless. So was the RAA primarily looking at driving records? If so, then it’s probably my ticket that did us in. But the documentation we got from Homefront said that our renter insurance was “higher than it otherwise might be” because of what RAA had to say. Interestingly enough, though, when our auto insurance went up from $140 to $185, our renter insurance stayed at $10. And on top of that everything attributes any change in our rates to the RAA and nothing about driving records.

The documentation listed two “reference numbers” so maybe there were two reports. If so, then we need to get the other one. But the form that we filled out didn’t give us any way to specify and asked us things like driver’s license state and whatnot that suggested that we were primarily going to get DMV info. So now I have to call the RAA and find out if there were two reports and how we can get the other. If they’ll even talk to me since said reports were in my wife’s name. I also filled out another form to see what they have on me and if my Spitstorm Ticket shows up then that answers that question.

By the time this is all said and done, I can’t help but wonder if enough man-hours have been spent that it cost us more than just paying the $195 monthly cost. Even so, if there is some big black beast haunting our credit, I want to know about it. I contacted our former landlord and asked her if she had filed any complaints, which was our theory for a while, but she hadn’t. She then suggested that there might have been identity theft (who knows what was sent to the apartment in Estacado before we got our change-of-address filled out?), which would be something that we definitely need to know about.

Several years ago on a Monday in September, things were not going well between Evangeline and I. That Thursday night I was going to take a trip out to Gilead and visit my friend Clint who was attending Southern Cross University out there. Mostly, though, I found that time away from Colosse and Evangeline was less miserable than time with her in the city.

Before that happened, though, I wanted to try to smooth things over at least a little bit so that I wouldn’t spend the whole trip worrying if there was anything to even go back to. So against my better judgment I bought her flowers. I say “against my better judgment” because at that point every time I had gotten her flowers up to that point there had been some sort of disaster in our relationship. Not even because of the flowers, really. Just bad timing. Over and over again.

So at about 2am that night, I decided to go on a secret mission and deliver some flowers and left them on her car. I figured that was Tuesday, maybe we’d have a talk that night. We’d talk again on Wednesday, and then Thursday I would leave before something else could go wrong and ruin my trip. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should have waited another day for the flowers. Three days was way too long for something not to erupt at that time.

I stayed up for a few more hours when I got back and it was 6am when I went to sleep. My reasoning was that there was a 30/70 chance that she would dodge getting online so that she didn’t feel obligated to repay my spontaneous (okay, not exactly spontaneous) generosity with having to, you know, talk to me. She’d acknowledge the flowers and thank me in any event, and she’d probably do so in more than just a two-line email or something like that, but I didn’t want to spend the whole day worrying about the alternative and I couldn’t be worrying if I was asleep and if I didn’t wake up until 3 then I could get online and she could thank me without the awkwardness of any further communication unless she felt so inclined.

I hadn’t been asleep for maybe a couple hours when I got a call.

“Are you watching television?!” She said

“bdabdabdabda… wha?”

“Are you watching television?”

“I was asleep, actually. Wait… huh? What’s on television?”

“Turn on your television right now. Some terrorists have flown planes into the World Trade Center,” She explained. “Oh, and thanks for the flowers.”

After we got off the phone, I was in the living room watching television when my roommate Karl got home from work. “Have you seen the news?” I said almost immediately. Sue me, I wanted to be the first one to tell somebody. I was a little bit worried about his reaction, though. Karl was one of those people that was already smart but for some reason felt the need to augment the perception of his smarts by having opinions different from everybody else and so if everyone else was upset about such an attack he was the sort of person that would find humor in it or say that we deserved it or something like that. That was my fear, anyway.

I think that the news stunned him so much that he didn’t even have time to strategize how he could use this to prove that he was smarter than everyone else. As he and I watched along with our friend John (”Fuzzles”) Fustle, he was actually the most pissed off. Fuzzles was angrily talking about how our warmongering president was going to use this to blow up foreigners and I was too stunned to be angry. Stunned may not even be the right word. The tragedy hadn’t set in yet. At that point it was all so… interesting. Just very, very interesting.

I talked to Eva again that afternoon. Her employer was giving everyone the day off. I was excited because it might mean that we got to spend some time together. She dodged and weaved saying that she felt like she needed to be with her family until she was contacted by an ex-boyfriend pulling a Dan Merchand and decided to spend the afternoon consoling with him. Upon finding that out and that classes at Southern Tech were cancelled until further notice, I said “screw it” and left for Gilead a couple days early.

I heard two unbelievable ads on the radio as I drove. The first said something to the effect of “Fly plane into wall! Stoopid! Getting rates from many auto insurance companies! Smart!” Then there was another that said… “In times of war… you need CABLE!” (it was an ad for Band of Brothers, a then-new HBO miniseries). I have to think that both ads were recorded and set to play before the attacks. Notably, I never heard the ads after that day.

If there’s any way to avoid current events, it’s by visiting Clint. The guy is about as apolitical as anyone can be. About the only thing I remember about that visit that pertained to the attacks was a really dirty joke by his then-roommate about the 9/11 victims and necrophilia and I can’t even remember the joke (or if it was at all funny then or now).

A couple months later, Eva was gone for good. A couple days after that, she and the Merchand guy were officially an item. At the end of my trip that week, it all finally hit me on the drive home. Not having known anybody in the attack (once I knew that my brother wasn’t), I had to create fictional people that were in the WTC to be able to relate to it and to understand it. But it eventually happened.

My commute to work pretty much goes as follows. I drive about 25 minutes or so to get onto and then 22 miles down Interstate 3 to the town of Paulsboro, where I peel off and take Splinterstate 803. Including the usual delays at the entrance ramp, it generally takes me about 10 minutes to drive 8 miles down 803 to get to Castlewood, which is where I frequently get my gas. The drive from Castlewood to New City is another 6 miles or so. Once in New City, I exit to 740 and within 10 minutes or 5 miles or so land in Enterprise City and at my job at Mindstorm.

If you read the above carefully (you probably just skimmed over it, that’s what I would have done), you’ll notice something missing. I deliberately left out how long it takes to get from Castlewood to New City. I left that information out because I have absolutely no idea how long it takes, though I’d say that it averages about 30 minutes or so. If you’re keeping track, that means that it takes me about 45 minutes to cover 35 miles of the commute and approximately 30 minutes to cover the other 6.

But I didn’t leave the 30 minutes out of the initial description so that I could shock you with it later. I left it out because it is always the variable in my commute. My commute may average 75 minutes but that’s only if you’re looking at the median and the mode. That’s how long my drive usually takes in the morning. Somewhere between 70 and 80. Sometimes less, but sometimes much, much more.

I knew that having a daily commute time of over two hours would take its toll when I signed on to work at Mindstorm. I knew that it would be less time doing things that I enjoy doing and more time in the car and that there is the blood-pressure toll of long commutes in traffic (something that I never experienced in my long commute in Deseret, thankfully). I accepted that or at least thought that I did.

But what drives me crazy is the drive from Castlewood to New City and I don’t know how to make it stop driving me crazy. It’s not just that it takes almost as long as the rest of the commute. It’s not even that I spend that time barely going or weaving through traffic with all the success of Peter Gibbons in Office Space. It’s that so much of my day revolves around just how bad that six mile stretch is going to be. And perhaps moreso that I have absolutely no control over it.

My morning commute takes somewhere between an hour one day and two hours and ten minutes another. Anyone that’s lived in a city isn’t completely surprised by that variance, but what surprises me most is that the two hour drive was not marked by some sort of accident or closure or construction. As near as I can tell, nothing happened at all. When it’s construction you usually see it an can pass it and closures are also obvious enough. When an accident is cleared you can usually see the cars and people on the side of the road or even if you can’t there comes a point where everything suddenly speeds up and you say to yourself “Oh, okay, they must have cleared whatever it was that was causing the congestion. Nothing like that.

And 90% of all of the congestion takes place on that six mile stretch. If the drive takes half-an-hour more than usual, you can bank on 20 (probably 25) of those extra 30 minutes occurring between Castlewood and New City and most of the remainder being the stretch either right before it or after it. Every day, whether traffic keeps me on the road for an hour or more than two hours, traffic stops in about the same place, on Exit 6 to Castlewood. The reason that this is so frustrating and disheartening is that when you see the stall in front of you and you come to a half, you don’t know when you’re going to be moving again. When you’re driving to Paulsboro and then to Castlewood you are sailing but you know… you know… that you’re going to be sitting there in fumes and scrambling as best you can just to get one or two cars ahead. And so it’s like waiting for the shoe to drop or the hammer to fall. Since there aren’t many exits, if you think you might even need to go to the bathroom, fill your tires, or something like that you had better stop ahead of time just in case it’s another hellacious day.

I have driven in traffic and I have driven in traffic, but I have never in my life seen anything like it. Not just because I know every morning that it’s going to happen but because there’s just no way to account for it. I can leave at 6:45 in the morning and it will be there and I can leave at 8:30 and it will still be there. And there’s no pattern as to when it will be better and when it will be worse. I can’t say “If I leave at such-and-such time, at least it won’t be as bad”. On the three worst days I’ve had I left at 7:10, 7:40, and 7:50. I thought that I could avoid it by leaving at 9 or so because one day I left then and the roads were clear, but it was a fluke because it was the Friday before Labor Day. I tried it again and it took the usual (to the extent that there is ever a “usual”) buck-fifteen.

The only saving grace is that I have my audiobooks. I’ve made my way through the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio plays and audiobooks and am not working on Terry Pratchett. I’m considering Spanish tapes to try to make productive use out of my time. There are worse things than being trapped in a car, I’ve decided.

Like shared or public transportation.

It was far from a coincidence that Kyle Quindlen and I, friends from back in Colosse, ended up living in Estacado at the same time.

When he and I were in college, we took a trip to Estacado with Hubert, Clint, and others and had the time of our lives. We loved it there. We swore that if we couldn’t find work in Colosse (the Colossean economy was in the crapper at the time) that we’d just pick up and move out there. He ended up transferring to the University of Estacado in Almeida while Clancy and I lived in nearby Santomas and I worked in Almeida. We had lunch regularly. In addition to Clancy’s career aspirations and my really liking the area, he was one of the reasons that we relocated to that state.

The fact that I moved from Estacado, where Kyle was living, to Cascadia, where his sister Kelly had moved to, is a bit more coincidental. Cascadia was something of an inevitability if Clancy could get the work contract and when she did it was “off we go!” Kelly had moved up a bit earlier for her boyfriend, which is a post in and of itself.

Even so, the Zaulem Sound area is big and attracts a lot of IT people, which Kelly and I both are. So it’s not a huge surprise that we ended up in the same town.

Nor is it a big surprise that we both ended up working for Mindstorm. It’s one of the major employers of the area, after all.

It is a bit of a surprise that we actually work for the same contracting company since she didn’t hook me up with them.

A bit more of a surprise that she works in the same division of the company that I do considering that we work in very different areas of technology.

The surprise is that not only does she live in the same area that I do (a couple thousand miles from where we were raised), contracting through the same placement agency in the same division… but that in a campus of 25,000 in a city with millions of people in a nation of hundreds of millions, she works on the same floor of the same building that I do.