I don't really set New Year's resolutions because I am usually working on various things throughout the year as the need arises. Still, I learn some things from those, and if some of you are about to make some resolutions, this could help.
I am just going to give a case study of one thing I am working on.
I am diabetic, and one thing that it is important to me to do is to regularly check my blood sugar. I am not great at this, because of various stupid things that come up.
I have misplaced my glaucometer before, but sometimes it is just that it is in my purse or somewhere inconvenient, and I don't get to it. Sometimes I know I have let too much time go by because I grab the meter and this time I am going to do it for sure, and it needs to charge.
More often the issue is that I primarily remember to do it in the morning when I get up, which is a good time to take it, but only taking in the morning is not enough. I tend to run higher in the morning, which is not bad on its own, but if I only check in the morning I don't get an accurate picture of how I am doing.
Because of this, I sometimes decide not to take it in the morning because I need to get a different time of day, but then I forget.
This is how I am getting around that. I have created a paper to cover the time between now and my next doctor's appointment. Measuring twice a day has been my goal, so I am putting two times under each day. This allows me to make sure that I get a variety, not just of different times, but of combinations of different times.
The paper, a pen, and my currently charging meter are all on my desk, where I spend a lot of time. This should help me keep in mind when to measure, and have everything ready to do so. For example, I see that tomorrow I want to measure before breakfast and before lunch. I have that in my head already, and I will see it early tomorrow.
This should work. Even for weekend days, where I don't spend as much time at the computer, I will have seen what Saturday should be while I was working on Friday, and if I then go to fill in the time for Saturday I can check out Sunday, and I expect this to work.
For everything you do or don't do that you find frustrating, there are reasons why it happens. You can be mad at yourself, but that's not nearly as productive as figuring out where the pitfalls are and how to help them.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Moving
I want to stick to some easier things until we get past the holiday season, because I assume that people are busy and distracted.
I helped my brother move into a new place yesterday, and it brought back some memories.
One memory from long ago is that when I first went away to college, I did not bring towels. They seem like an obvious thing to bring, but I had stayed in the dorms before for different programs, and they provided sheets and towels. It totally made sense that for regular dorm residents things might be different than people there for a week for Girls' State or something like that, but my first shower involved just standing there for a while after turning off the water, hoping to drip dry a fair amount before I put on my clothes.
The other memory I have is to always buy a plunger as soon as you move in. I know that one because one of my mission companions got sick not long after we had changed apartments.
It makes total sense. You certainly don't want to pack up the old plunger after the things it has seen, and I don't recommend that at all. Throw the old one out; just remember to get a new one. If you wait until you are reminded, especially in a single bathroom dwelling, that would be an unfortunate thing.
Neither of these were problems for my brother, but one immediate realization was that he needed a shower curtain. If you live in a place with shower doors, you don't think of it, but moving into a place without doors, that shower curtain becomes really necessary. If you can make a mental note when you are looking at places, whether the shower is enclosed by curtains or doors, that can help you be more prepared.
Fortunately we are often near places where these essential items can be obtained easily, but moving is a stressful thing. The things that you can remember and prepare for in advance subtract from that stress instead of adding to it. That's worth something.
I helped my brother move into a new place yesterday, and it brought back some memories.
One memory from long ago is that when I first went away to college, I did not bring towels. They seem like an obvious thing to bring, but I had stayed in the dorms before for different programs, and they provided sheets and towels. It totally made sense that for regular dorm residents things might be different than people there for a week for Girls' State or something like that, but my first shower involved just standing there for a while after turning off the water, hoping to drip dry a fair amount before I put on my clothes.
The other memory I have is to always buy a plunger as soon as you move in. I know that one because one of my mission companions got sick not long after we had changed apartments.
It makes total sense. You certainly don't want to pack up the old plunger after the things it has seen, and I don't recommend that at all. Throw the old one out; just remember to get a new one. If you wait until you are reminded, especially in a single bathroom dwelling, that would be an unfortunate thing.
Neither of these were problems for my brother, but one immediate realization was that he needed a shower curtain. If you live in a place with shower doors, you don't think of it, but moving into a place without doors, that shower curtain becomes really necessary. If you can make a mental note when you are looking at places, whether the shower is enclosed by curtains or doors, that can help you be more prepared.
Fortunately we are often near places where these essential items can be obtained easily, but moving is a stressful thing. The things that you can remember and prepare for in advance subtract from that stress instead of adding to it. That's worth something.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Contacting the government
I have written my first letter, but before I write about that I want to share an inspiring story.
Many of you have witnessed heavy rains this week, and know that for many people near creeks and rivers there has been severe flooding.
One of those areas has been Vernonia, where my friend Jeana lives. She wrote this on Facebook on December 9th:
"I just want to point out that we as a community did the right thing in funding a new school and moving it to higher ground. Had we not done that, our schools would be under water yet again. Thank you to all of the people of Vernonia for voting to get the schools to higher ground. This has mitigated the hazards of this flooding and made it less damaging to the entire community. Yes there are many affected still but they have a safe place to go. "
That was good to read, but it was also interesting going back and finding this article:
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/index.ssf/2008/02/vernonia_school_district_seeks.html
Note that money was tight then, and it would only have gotten worse in the following months. Still, they pulled together and did it. That tells me there is hope for these coastal communities that need to move their schools. There is hope for communities that have schools that require extensive retrofitting. We can do this.
Back to what I am doing.
The recommendation was to write to local, state, and federal leaders. I started with the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management because they will be the ones working most closely with the Oregon Fuel Depot. Here is what I wrote:
Hello,
Although I live outside of the Portland city limits, I am very concerned about the Oregon Fuel Depot.
That specific concern comes from watching the Oregon Frontline Unprepared special, but I have been more aware since The New Yorker article. While I have always been interested in personal preparedness, the article reminded me that it is not enough. No one individual can fix the infrastructure, which will be necessary for the recovery of the area.
The Oregon Fuel Depot is a unique part of that equation. Not only would the loss of the fuel source in itself be devastating, but the environmental contamination of the water supply, and the ground, in addition to the fire risk, makes securing of the site well before an earthquake absolutely vital.
My understanding is that your office will be considering this issue. I hope that this will be resolved with the urgency it requires. Its importance cannot be underestimated.
Thank you for your efforts.
Gina Harris
Aloha, Oregon
It will not be exactly the same letter for everyone I write to. As their responsibilities are different, the letters will be different, but having the bare bones of what I want to say makes the customization easier. For some I may focus more on other DOGAMI recommendations.
Now I am going to put some actual leader information.
Federal - I think the Department of Energy (Ernest Moniz) is most pertinent, but you could make a case for Homeland Security (Jeh Johnson).
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet
I already know that my next three are Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Jeff Merkley, and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, but these are easy to find.
https://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup
Locally, Jeff Barker may represent some of you, but when we get to the state legislature the districts are a lot smaller. This is a good starting place:
https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/
If you have mayors and city councilors to write to, that is a good step. Unincorporated Aloha does not, and I am not going to write to Washington County specifically about the Oregon Fuel Depot, though I might write to them about other DOGAMI recommendations. Also, it can totally make sense to write to Metro.
http://www.co.washington.or.us/
http://www.oregonmetro.gov/
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people only has the meaning we give it.
Many of you have witnessed heavy rains this week, and know that for many people near creeks and rivers there has been severe flooding.
One of those areas has been Vernonia, where my friend Jeana lives. She wrote this on Facebook on December 9th:
"I just want to point out that we as a community did the right thing in funding a new school and moving it to higher ground. Had we not done that, our schools would be under water yet again. Thank you to all of the people of Vernonia for voting to get the schools to higher ground. This has mitigated the hazards of this flooding and made it less damaging to the entire community. Yes there are many affected still but they have a safe place to go. "
That was good to read, but it was also interesting going back and finding this article:
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/index.ssf/2008/02/vernonia_school_district_seeks.html
Note that money was tight then, and it would only have gotten worse in the following months. Still, they pulled together and did it. That tells me there is hope for these coastal communities that need to move their schools. There is hope for communities that have schools that require extensive retrofitting. We can do this.
Back to what I am doing.
The recommendation was to write to local, state, and federal leaders. I started with the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management because they will be the ones working most closely with the Oregon Fuel Depot. Here is what I wrote:
Hello,
Although I live outside of the Portland city limits, I am very concerned about the Oregon Fuel Depot.
That specific concern comes from watching the Oregon Frontline Unprepared special, but I have been more aware since The New Yorker article. While I have always been interested in personal preparedness, the article reminded me that it is not enough. No one individual can fix the infrastructure, which will be necessary for the recovery of the area.
The Oregon Fuel Depot is a unique part of that equation. Not only would the loss of the fuel source in itself be devastating, but the environmental contamination of the water supply, and the ground, in addition to the fire risk, makes securing of the site well before an earthquake absolutely vital.
My understanding is that your office will be considering this issue. I hope that this will be resolved with the urgency it requires. Its importance cannot be underestimated.
Thank you for your efforts.
Gina Harris
Aloha, Oregon
It will not be exactly the same letter for everyone I write to. As their responsibilities are different, the letters will be different, but having the bare bones of what I want to say makes the customization easier. For some I may focus more on other DOGAMI recommendations.
Now I am going to put some actual leader information.
Federal - I think the Department of Energy (Ernest Moniz) is most pertinent, but you could make a case for Homeland Security (Jeh Johnson).
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet
I already know that my next three are Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Jeff Merkley, and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, but these are easy to find.
https://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup
Locally, Jeff Barker may represent some of you, but when we get to the state legislature the districts are a lot smaller. This is a good starting place:
https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/
If you have mayors and city councilors to write to, that is a good step. Unincorporated Aloha does not, and I am not going to write to Washington County specifically about the Oregon Fuel Depot, though I might write to them about other DOGAMI recommendations. Also, it can totally make sense to write to Metro.
http://www.co.washington.or.us/
http://www.oregonmetro.gov/
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people only has the meaning we give it.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Write to your...
I don't have time for a normal blog post today, but I did recently receive an answer to an inquiry and I am putting it up here for discussion next week:
"Thank you for reaching out. I suggest that you read the Oregonian article on 2013 DOGAMI energy sector earthquake risk report (see second link) http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/09/oregons_energy_hub_on_the_will.html
And a recent follow up article in the Portland Tribune
http://portlandtribune.com/sl/276634-152697-quake-could-threaten-90-percent-of-oregons-fuel-supply
These are the four basic recommendations contained in the DOGAMI report.
1) Seismic Vulnerability Assessment
2) Mitigation Program
3) Oversight body to oversee progress in Fuel Depot
4) Improve Awareness in general public
What can citizens do? I would recommend that you read and share the DOGAMI report, Portland Tribune article and recent OPB unprepared special www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/. You can:
Recommend elected officials (local, state, federal) to follow up on the 4 dogami recommendations.
Contact Portland Bureau of Management, as they are developing plans to address the fuel depot
Learn about personal risks and act accordingly:
e.g., Ask local emergency managers what to do if you live in CEI area and/or Hire expert from private sector"
Sunday, November 29, 2015
The new handbook again
I know; I can't believe I am still writing about this either.
It's just that I suddenly felt that it made sense, at least in a different way than I had understood it before, though that didn't mean that it was handled in the best way possible.
I was thinking that the protecting children part was about how if they are hearing one thing at church and another at home it could be confusing, because that was pretty much how it was phrased. Then it suddenly came to me that if you have children being baptized at eight and then in their teens deciding that the favoring of heterosexual marriage is wrong and unfair, that teenager could then break sacred covenants that it would be better not to have made in the first place.
If you don't believe there is any power in the covenants, then that sounds like a stupid concern. There might be less reason to care about it, except on a level of social exclusion, and I think a lot of people are looking at it that way, but this seems like it could have been communicated much more clearly. After all, when you are talking about protecting children and also referencing homosexuality, there is a history of gay people being portrayed as predatory and corrupting anyway that you don't want to echo.
This is one reason that the desire for a more diverse leadership is reasonable. People with different experiences can hear things in different ways and pick up on different things, and that is valuable. I do think if it was explained this way, that we have children who make covenants that they break later because of the conflict between what home says and church says, and it is better that they make the decision as adults, I think people would get that. You can understand your baptismal covenants at one level at eight, but there are a lot of things about life that you don't understand.
There is the feeling of exclusion still, and for people who believe that the church will eventually accept same-sex relationships there is not much comfort that it is not happening now, but viewed in that way it still makes sense.
There is still the matter of the baby blessings. That is not a saving ordinance, so it feels like it should be open to anyone. Apparently it was brought up because it creates a record, and then that is a child of record that the church keeps track of, and where there is the assumption of baptism at eight. I have some thoughts on that as well.
My mission was serving Laotian refugees, and there were a lot of people baptized a few years earlier who were completely inactive. The first missionaries to start teaching them did not speak the language, and there is a sense that it was rushed and there may have been some over-zealousness in offering people couches and clothes and beds, because many of them were poor.
I completely understand the frustration of trying to keep track of people who are not coming and are not interested, and I often thought it would have been better if many of them had never been baptized. I get that.
I also know that it was amazing how receptive some of their children were. A lot of the families did go for a while, so there's no knowing how many primary lessons they got, but at the time I really saw how receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost could be beneficial, even when there was not a lot of nurturing and instruction that followed.
So I see both sides of that, and drafting a policy when there is a whole range of individuals and circumstances with so many different possibilities is a difficult thing.
What I do know is that it all gets easier when people stop being awful. If people will spend more time loving and serving than judging and condemning it will work well. Let's all focus on that.
It's just that I suddenly felt that it made sense, at least in a different way than I had understood it before, though that didn't mean that it was handled in the best way possible.
I was thinking that the protecting children part was about how if they are hearing one thing at church and another at home it could be confusing, because that was pretty much how it was phrased. Then it suddenly came to me that if you have children being baptized at eight and then in their teens deciding that the favoring of heterosexual marriage is wrong and unfair, that teenager could then break sacred covenants that it would be better not to have made in the first place.
If you don't believe there is any power in the covenants, then that sounds like a stupid concern. There might be less reason to care about it, except on a level of social exclusion, and I think a lot of people are looking at it that way, but this seems like it could have been communicated much more clearly. After all, when you are talking about protecting children and also referencing homosexuality, there is a history of gay people being portrayed as predatory and corrupting anyway that you don't want to echo.
This is one reason that the desire for a more diverse leadership is reasonable. People with different experiences can hear things in different ways and pick up on different things, and that is valuable. I do think if it was explained this way, that we have children who make covenants that they break later because of the conflict between what home says and church says, and it is better that they make the decision as adults, I think people would get that. You can understand your baptismal covenants at one level at eight, but there are a lot of things about life that you don't understand.
There is the feeling of exclusion still, and for people who believe that the church will eventually accept same-sex relationships there is not much comfort that it is not happening now, but viewed in that way it still makes sense.
There is still the matter of the baby blessings. That is not a saving ordinance, so it feels like it should be open to anyone. Apparently it was brought up because it creates a record, and then that is a child of record that the church keeps track of, and where there is the assumption of baptism at eight. I have some thoughts on that as well.
My mission was serving Laotian refugees, and there were a lot of people baptized a few years earlier who were completely inactive. The first missionaries to start teaching them did not speak the language, and there is a sense that it was rushed and there may have been some over-zealousness in offering people couches and clothes and beds, because many of them were poor.
I completely understand the frustration of trying to keep track of people who are not coming and are not interested, and I often thought it would have been better if many of them had never been baptized. I get that.
I also know that it was amazing how receptive some of their children were. A lot of the families did go for a while, so there's no knowing how many primary lessons they got, but at the time I really saw how receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost could be beneficial, even when there was not a lot of nurturing and instruction that followed.
So I see both sides of that, and drafting a policy when there is a whole range of individuals and circumstances with so many different possibilities is a difficult thing.
What I do know is that it all gets easier when people stop being awful. If people will spend more time loving and serving than judging and condemning it will work well. Let's all focus on that.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Water!
This is kind of getting back to earthquakes, but not specifically so.
I was talking with some people about it, and how you need to be prepared for longer than three days now, which for a long time was the gold standard. Now it is more common to hear 7-10 days, and it occurred to me that I want two weeks worth of water.
We do not have two weeks worth of water. That would be a lot. It becomes very difficult to store and find containers for that amount.
It used to be easy to find 50-gallon barrels, but that has become less common lately, because shipping them is expensive even when they are empty and moving them around when they are full is difficult.
Still, I want two weeks worth of water. I want that even being very impressed with my local water district's emergency planning, and knowing that they are collaborating with other local water districts, so water in this area should be doing pretty well.
I believe in inspiration, so if knowing all that my goal is still two weeks worth of water, then that's what I should be trying for.
I also believe in doing things at a reasonable pace, and I feel okay about that, so I am not going to panic right now. Some of our water storage is in one-gallon containers that Winco sells. These are not in the HDPE milk jug style plastic, which is not suitable for storage, but in the hard PETE plastic.
I bet we can get a few of those this week. That's something we can build up.
We don't have room for a two week supply of those, but we can add some more now and then work out where the rest will go later.
Also, it is worth remembering that we have the water heater, which is full of water. Yes, it can collect some sediment, though it shouldn't collect very much, but that's something I can look into, both for how quickly it should amass sediment and how to rinse that out, because there is a method for doing that. I still want to have two weeks worth of water outside of the tank, but the tank can augment the supply until we get there.
Water may not be your hot issue, but if you work on preparedness you will probably discover your hot issue. It may be something you can work on gradually, or you may feel a need to speed it up, but developing the ability to listen and hear is the greatest tool for preparation that there is.
I was talking with some people about it, and how you need to be prepared for longer than three days now, which for a long time was the gold standard. Now it is more common to hear 7-10 days, and it occurred to me that I want two weeks worth of water.
We do not have two weeks worth of water. That would be a lot. It becomes very difficult to store and find containers for that amount.
It used to be easy to find 50-gallon barrels, but that has become less common lately, because shipping them is expensive even when they are empty and moving them around when they are full is difficult.
Still, I want two weeks worth of water. I want that even being very impressed with my local water district's emergency planning, and knowing that they are collaborating with other local water districts, so water in this area should be doing pretty well.
I believe in inspiration, so if knowing all that my goal is still two weeks worth of water, then that's what I should be trying for.
I also believe in doing things at a reasonable pace, and I feel okay about that, so I am not going to panic right now. Some of our water storage is in one-gallon containers that Winco sells. These are not in the HDPE milk jug style plastic, which is not suitable for storage, but in the hard PETE plastic.
I bet we can get a few of those this week. That's something we can build up.
We don't have room for a two week supply of those, but we can add some more now and then work out where the rest will go later.
Also, it is worth remembering that we have the water heater, which is full of water. Yes, it can collect some sediment, though it shouldn't collect very much, but that's something I can look into, both for how quickly it should amass sediment and how to rinse that out, because there is a method for doing that. I still want to have two weeks worth of water outside of the tank, but the tank can augment the supply until we get there.
Water may not be your hot issue, but if you work on preparedness you will probably discover your hot issue. It may be something you can work on gradually, or you may feel a need to speed it up, but developing the ability to listen and hear is the greatest tool for preparation that there is.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Responding in difficult times
I really wanted to get back to the Cascadia Megaquake. I think next week I will, but last week it felt important to write what I did.
I mention that for two reasons. One is that I seem to have a few more things to say this week, but also I learned of the terrorism attacks in Paris when I was close to posting a music review.
When things like that happen, it always feels like the other things that I put out there are trivial. Right now my songs of the day are Muppet songs, and the band I reviewed Thursday wasn't that good. So sometimes there is this feeling like I shouldn't do it, and then I pretty much always do it anyway.
That may be partly just my personality - kind of bull-headed, yes, but also I get focused on tasks and then I need to complete them. However that came about, I have decided it's important to post those things anyway, because in these times if we waited for there to be no tragedies then we would never do anything at all. We've gotten to where there are a lot of things that don't even register. There are a lot of bombings and shootings we don't even notice anymore, because they are so common.
A world like that is cause for concern, and for action. If I were going to post something that would contribute to the ugliness I should stop myself, but I should have done that before the tragedy happened to. My usual pursuits are spreading knowledge, sharing things that I think are cool, and turning a spotlight on bands (some of which aren't great but a lot of them are) because I believe art is important, and individuals are important, and that giving people a chance is important. So that's what I do and I can live with that.
And often if I take several weeks to get to a current event, that may be the amount of time it takes me to feel like I have a handle on it. When my feelings tell me there is an immediate need, then I follow that.
Those things are more obvious in my main blog, because it has a wider range. This blog and the travel blog are more focused, but even in the travel blog I once found that I could not write about the aquarium until I watched and wrote about Blackfish.
I wanted to clarify that, but also I have some things to say about what I don't say.
It occurred to me after last week that it is possible to read a lot of my posts and not know what my actual opinion is on some hot issues.
That is pretty deliberate. Picking a side will often alienate people who could benefit from reading it, but also, thinking there are two diametrically opposed sides is often a gross oversimplification. Even if you could draw a fairly clear line roughly in the middle, there would be nuances and gradations on either side, and if I'm writing about it there is probably already too much division.
Also, I am often still learning, and I see new aspects later that I hadn't realized, but because my focus was on things to think about, and to remember while thinking about, instead of telling people what to think, the post still holds up. It would be pretty presumptuous for me to tell people what to think, but if I can give some guidance on thinking better, that is so what I am all about.
This leads to something I didn't write about last week, but I do think I need to address. For a lot of people the new handbook guidelines seemed to lead to them thinking about whether it was time to leave the church.
That is a question that puts me on guard, because I have seen many people who said they only wanted some time off from church, and they changed in ways that they never expected, losing something precious. It is easy to underestimate the cost.
However, I am also always learning. I have a friend who was in a really toxic ward who turned against her. They were clearly wrong, and she did not have the energy to fight it, so she has been taking time off from church, and I can't fault her. Someone fighting it could have been a good thing, but that doesn't mean it was her responsibility.
The point of that is that there can be a lot of legitimate decisions, and I can't judge that or tell you what to do. I can say that it is better to be making decision by attempting to do what is right, and praying about it, than seeking vengeance. I could say that, but my thought is that if I had a toxic ward trying to punish me, I would fight it until they were all the ones needing a rest. That sounds pretty vengeful. Again, that doesn't mean that fighting it would be wrong, but there might be good and not so good ways of doing it, and some mindsets are better than others.
So if some people feel a need to take a break, or write a letter to the First Presidency, or wear a rainbow tie to church, or have prayed about it and reconciled themselves, all of those things can be okay. Life can be tricky. It's because of all the flawed people, but you're one of them. Welcome!
There is one thing I am completely comfortable in judging though, and so I'll finish with that.
Since the news of the handbook changes came out, I have been hearing stories of abuse. This includes an anonymous note on a car telling someone that since they were apostate, and their presence was bringing everyone else down, that this was a good time for them to stop coming, and another person goading the children of a lesbian mother, tearing her down to them.
The church leadership may not have handled their situation as well as they could have, but I do believe their purposes were to avoid conflicts, not to give fuel to persecution.
The Gospel is a good yardstick for measuring your own life; it is not intended to be a cudgel for beating everyone else. That is a sin.
If you are a bishop or stake president you will have times when you need to counsel with people about their behavior, and there can be some judgement there, but it should be done with enough love and desire for the welfare of the person that the judgement is not the most noticeable part.
If you're not in that position, you do not get to judge, you do not get to make anonymous suggestions, and you do not get to harass. Then you have the greater sin. If those things sound at all attractive to you, read D&C section 121 again and see if you can figure out what your motivations are.
I mention that for two reasons. One is that I seem to have a few more things to say this week, but also I learned of the terrorism attacks in Paris when I was close to posting a music review.
When things like that happen, it always feels like the other things that I put out there are trivial. Right now my songs of the day are Muppet songs, and the band I reviewed Thursday wasn't that good. So sometimes there is this feeling like I shouldn't do it, and then I pretty much always do it anyway.
That may be partly just my personality - kind of bull-headed, yes, but also I get focused on tasks and then I need to complete them. However that came about, I have decided it's important to post those things anyway, because in these times if we waited for there to be no tragedies then we would never do anything at all. We've gotten to where there are a lot of things that don't even register. There are a lot of bombings and shootings we don't even notice anymore, because they are so common.
A world like that is cause for concern, and for action. If I were going to post something that would contribute to the ugliness I should stop myself, but I should have done that before the tragedy happened to. My usual pursuits are spreading knowledge, sharing things that I think are cool, and turning a spotlight on bands (some of which aren't great but a lot of them are) because I believe art is important, and individuals are important, and that giving people a chance is important. So that's what I do and I can live with that.
And often if I take several weeks to get to a current event, that may be the amount of time it takes me to feel like I have a handle on it. When my feelings tell me there is an immediate need, then I follow that.
Those things are more obvious in my main blog, because it has a wider range. This blog and the travel blog are more focused, but even in the travel blog I once found that I could not write about the aquarium until I watched and wrote about Blackfish.
I wanted to clarify that, but also I have some things to say about what I don't say.
It occurred to me after last week that it is possible to read a lot of my posts and not know what my actual opinion is on some hot issues.
That is pretty deliberate. Picking a side will often alienate people who could benefit from reading it, but also, thinking there are two diametrically opposed sides is often a gross oversimplification. Even if you could draw a fairly clear line roughly in the middle, there would be nuances and gradations on either side, and if I'm writing about it there is probably already too much division.
Also, I am often still learning, and I see new aspects later that I hadn't realized, but because my focus was on things to think about, and to remember while thinking about, instead of telling people what to think, the post still holds up. It would be pretty presumptuous for me to tell people what to think, but if I can give some guidance on thinking better, that is so what I am all about.
This leads to something I didn't write about last week, but I do think I need to address. For a lot of people the new handbook guidelines seemed to lead to them thinking about whether it was time to leave the church.
That is a question that puts me on guard, because I have seen many people who said they only wanted some time off from church, and they changed in ways that they never expected, losing something precious. It is easy to underestimate the cost.
However, I am also always learning. I have a friend who was in a really toxic ward who turned against her. They were clearly wrong, and she did not have the energy to fight it, so she has been taking time off from church, and I can't fault her. Someone fighting it could have been a good thing, but that doesn't mean it was her responsibility.
The point of that is that there can be a lot of legitimate decisions, and I can't judge that or tell you what to do. I can say that it is better to be making decision by attempting to do what is right, and praying about it, than seeking vengeance. I could say that, but my thought is that if I had a toxic ward trying to punish me, I would fight it until they were all the ones needing a rest. That sounds pretty vengeful. Again, that doesn't mean that fighting it would be wrong, but there might be good and not so good ways of doing it, and some mindsets are better than others.
So if some people feel a need to take a break, or write a letter to the First Presidency, or wear a rainbow tie to church, or have prayed about it and reconciled themselves, all of those things can be okay. Life can be tricky. It's because of all the flawed people, but you're one of them. Welcome!
There is one thing I am completely comfortable in judging though, and so I'll finish with that.
Since the news of the handbook changes came out, I have been hearing stories of abuse. This includes an anonymous note on a car telling someone that since they were apostate, and their presence was bringing everyone else down, that this was a good time for them to stop coming, and another person goading the children of a lesbian mother, tearing her down to them.
The church leadership may not have handled their situation as well as they could have, but I do believe their purposes were to avoid conflicts, not to give fuel to persecution.
The Gospel is a good yardstick for measuring your own life; it is not intended to be a cudgel for beating everyone else. That is a sin.
If you are a bishop or stake president you will have times when you need to counsel with people about their behavior, and there can be some judgement there, but it should be done with enough love and desire for the welfare of the person that the judgement is not the most noticeable part.
If you're not in that position, you do not get to judge, you do not get to make anonymous suggestions, and you do not get to harass. Then you have the greater sin. If those things sound at all attractive to you, read D&C section 121 again and see if you can figure out what your motivations are.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Not infallible
There are two reactions to Pope Francis that I find interesting. I do find him likable and think that he is a good man. He looks especially good when compared to Pope Benedict. However, I think it is kind of silly when people get mad at him for not being liberal enough. You know how sometimes people illustrate how obvious something is by asking "Is the Pope Catholic?" Well, yes, he is. It is probably more productive to appreciate that he cares about climate change and economic inequality than to be mad that he still considers abortion a sin, though a forgivable one.
The other thing that I found interesting was when some people would get so angry at him for being more liberal, especially conservative Catholics. The Pope is supposed to be infallible, right? Don't you still think he's infallible?
We have never said that any of our leaders are infallible. We believe they are good men, and they are inspired, but we also believe they are human. There is room for error. Especially once you include local leaders, there's a lot of room for error.
Does it sound like I am getting to the new handbook instructions? I am.
Still, I am not necessarily going to write as much about that as I could. I have covered some of this ground before. I have written about believing in prophets and how things change before, most notably in a series from January 19. 2014 to February 23, 2014. I have written about gay marriage and homosexuality before:
http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2013/06/preparing-for-marriage-equality.html
http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2014/01/homosexuality-again.html
I do still have some thoughts on this particular thing, some more specific and some general.
Listening to Elder Christofferson, it sounds like the concern is more for if you have a household with a same-sex couple and children, and how it could be hard for the children to reconcile what they see at home and what they hear at church:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865640934/Elder-Christofferson-explains-updated-LDS-Church-policies-on-same-sex-marriage-and-children.html
I get that, but most of the people that I am thinking about are cases where one of the parents came out later, after there were children, so there are two households, one with a parent who probably had a pretty traumatic divorce and felt very betrayed, and now their kids can't even follow the normal path.
Initially I thought that this was poorly considered and would be walked back soon. Now I feel more like it will be that there are a lot of exceptions granted. I am sure there will be some growing pains. Those are my specific thoughts on this specific policy.
For my more general thoughts, one area that is frustrating in conference talks and things is that I often feel like the church is worrying more about the people who are thinking that someday gay couples will go to the temple, but my worry is more about the people who are always looking for validation that in fact all gay people are perverts and they knew it all along. I get really irritated with those people, and they get far too much validation which is often undeserved.
However, I believe that hard times are coming up for them too. The Church is putting out more documentation from its past. There is more information out there. Some people will find it disturbing - for example, could a major policy have just been decided and then upheld due to racism?
And then, when you look closer, you might find that it's not quite so simple, but also that a leader was allowed to be wrong, and maybe he was allowed to be wrong because so many members were willing to be wrong, and that doesn't invalidate everything but it is a lot to take in, especially if your faith so far has been built upon not thinking so much.
I think there are hard times coming. These are already hard times now, but they will get harder. There's a reason that only half of the virgins made it into the wedding.
That is not a happy thought, but what is a happy thought is that there is a plan. There is work in the spirit world, there is the Millennium for some things to be made up, and eternity for the rest. There is the Atonement, not just for forgiveness, and physical healing, but also emotional spiritual healing.
There can be legitimate questions about how to deal with any particular policy. Are there times when more needs to be said? For now, one thing I specifically want to be aware of is that there are people who are really hurt by this, and I want to be supportive of them. I am still going to church. I am still doing family history. I want to go to the temple Thursday. I will also correct anyone who says something really stupid.
It can be frustrating that sometimes we have such a hard time collectively finding the right balance, but I know my own struggles with doing so, and there are some ways in which I kind of have it together. Of course we mess up! I frustrate myself quite a bit too, but I remain amazed and grateful for the Lord's patience with us, and continued trust of us.
The other thing that I found interesting was when some people would get so angry at him for being more liberal, especially conservative Catholics. The Pope is supposed to be infallible, right? Don't you still think he's infallible?
We have never said that any of our leaders are infallible. We believe they are good men, and they are inspired, but we also believe they are human. There is room for error. Especially once you include local leaders, there's a lot of room for error.
Does it sound like I am getting to the new handbook instructions? I am.
Still, I am not necessarily going to write as much about that as I could. I have covered some of this ground before. I have written about believing in prophets and how things change before, most notably in a series from January 19. 2014 to February 23, 2014. I have written about gay marriage and homosexuality before:
http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2013/06/preparing-for-marriage-equality.html
http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2014/01/homosexuality-again.html
I do still have some thoughts on this particular thing, some more specific and some general.
Listening to Elder Christofferson, it sounds like the concern is more for if you have a household with a same-sex couple and children, and how it could be hard for the children to reconcile what they see at home and what they hear at church:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865640934/Elder-Christofferson-explains-updated-LDS-Church-policies-on-same-sex-marriage-and-children.html
I get that, but most of the people that I am thinking about are cases where one of the parents came out later, after there were children, so there are two households, one with a parent who probably had a pretty traumatic divorce and felt very betrayed, and now their kids can't even follow the normal path.
Initially I thought that this was poorly considered and would be walked back soon. Now I feel more like it will be that there are a lot of exceptions granted. I am sure there will be some growing pains. Those are my specific thoughts on this specific policy.
For my more general thoughts, one area that is frustrating in conference talks and things is that I often feel like the church is worrying more about the people who are thinking that someday gay couples will go to the temple, but my worry is more about the people who are always looking for validation that in fact all gay people are perverts and they knew it all along. I get really irritated with those people, and they get far too much validation which is often undeserved.
However, I believe that hard times are coming up for them too. The Church is putting out more documentation from its past. There is more information out there. Some people will find it disturbing - for example, could a major policy have just been decided and then upheld due to racism?
And then, when you look closer, you might find that it's not quite so simple, but also that a leader was allowed to be wrong, and maybe he was allowed to be wrong because so many members were willing to be wrong, and that doesn't invalidate everything but it is a lot to take in, especially if your faith so far has been built upon not thinking so much.
I think there are hard times coming. These are already hard times now, but they will get harder. There's a reason that only half of the virgins made it into the wedding.
That is not a happy thought, but what is a happy thought is that there is a plan. There is work in the spirit world, there is the Millennium for some things to be made up, and eternity for the rest. There is the Atonement, not just for forgiveness, and physical healing, but also emotional spiritual healing.
There can be legitimate questions about how to deal with any particular policy. Are there times when more needs to be said? For now, one thing I specifically want to be aware of is that there are people who are really hurt by this, and I want to be supportive of them. I am still going to church. I am still doing family history. I want to go to the temple Thursday. I will also correct anyone who says something really stupid.
It can be frustrating that sometimes we have such a hard time collectively finding the right balance, but I know my own struggles with doing so, and there are some ways in which I kind of have it together. Of course we mess up! I frustrate myself quite a bit too, but I remain amazed and grateful for the Lord's patience with us, and continued trust of us.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Cascadia Megaquake - Our reference materials
For the next few weeks I will continue posting about earthquakes, but I will be primarily referring to two sources, both of which are available on the internet.
One is the Oregon Resilience Plan. This was referred to in the Unprepared special, and is a comprehensive study of what the state needs to be prepared for a megaquake, so has been used for making suggestions to the legislature. This is a very valuable resource for collective action:
http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf
The other is the Unprepared page:
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
This focuses more on individual preparedness.
I am a little disappointed that I am not finding a link to watch the special online. I still have it on my DVR, but for anyone who missed it they should have a chance to go back.
Anyway, I will be going back and forth between the two. Both personal and collective preparedness are necessary. Either one alone would be insufficient.
Feel free to follow along, and I wouldn't mind hearing about your own efforts. We will all need to work together.
One is the Oregon Resilience Plan. This was referred to in the Unprepared special, and is a comprehensive study of what the state needs to be prepared for a megaquake, so has been used for making suggestions to the legislature. This is a very valuable resource for collective action:
http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf
The other is the Unprepared page:
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
This focuses more on individual preparedness.
I am a little disappointed that I am not finding a link to watch the special online. I still have it on my DVR, but for anyone who missed it they should have a chance to go back.
Anyway, I will be going back and forth between the two. Both personal and collective preparedness are necessary. Either one alone would be insufficient.
Feel free to follow along, and I wouldn't mind hearing about your own efforts. We will all need to work together.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Cascadia Megaquake - Personal big ticket items
There are two things that I would like to do but simply cannot afford to at this time.
One is solar panels. This is not solely specific to the megaquake. My initial interest in it is due to environmental concerns and energy independence. I mention it in conjunction with the megaquake because even if the power grid goes down, you could still have power.
That assumes that the earthquake does not damage the panels, so there is a risk there. Also, you do need to install something like a battery backup, but that is something that has been used successfully by solar panel owners during power outages caused by weather.
Not only would it be beneficial for you to maintain power for yourself, but there is this image that stays with me from Hurricane Sandy, and a gate with an power strip on an extension cord and a sign, "We have power. Please feel free to charge your phone."
http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cellphone-charging-new-york-620x465.jpeg
I think about that not just for the convenience of phones, but also for medications that need refrigeration, or electrical medical devices. If there are pockets of power while the grid is being repaired, that can do a lot of good.
The other thing I really want, and this is very earthquake specific, is getting the house bolted to the foundation. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and your home was built after 1978, this should already have been done. There are a lot of houses still in use that were built before then. My entire block and most of the nearby houses fall into that category.
For the structural recommendations that they make, a lot of them end up getting made with regular maintenance. Your water heater gets replaced every twelve years or so, and now it should be raised and strapped into place automatically. Roofs last longer, but if you have a house from before 1978, odds are good that the roof has been replaced at least once, and when mine was the chimney was reinforced. Bolting the house to the foundation doesn't neatly fold in with any other maintenance - it's something you just have to decide to do and do it.
(The other thing that is often mentioned is bracing the cripple wall, which would make sense to do at the same time as the bolting.)
Unfortunately, the basic quote that I got for bolting the house comes in at around $4000. (I could probably get it done for $3800.) I do not have that kind of money available.
I have to admit that looking at the instructions for doing so, it does seem like a project with strong do-it-yourself potential if you have any ability at all in that direction. I don't really, but there are people who do.
You can do some preliminary reading at http://www.earthquakesafety.com/earthquake-retrofitting.html, but I also recommend Living With Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest by Robert S Yeats. In addition to talking about bolting and structural reinforcements there is also practical information on non-structural improvements, like cabinet latches and shelving paper.
In the meantime, as so much of the past few weeks has focused on working together, it does make me wonder if there are ways neighborhoods could come together and get collective deals on panel installation or retrofitting. Maybe a few people with home improvement know-how could combine with neighbors who know less but are still willing to help, and make an entire neighborhood stronger.
Not all pockets of power have to be electrical in nature.
One is solar panels. This is not solely specific to the megaquake. My initial interest in it is due to environmental concerns and energy independence. I mention it in conjunction with the megaquake because even if the power grid goes down, you could still have power.
That assumes that the earthquake does not damage the panels, so there is a risk there. Also, you do need to install something like a battery backup, but that is something that has been used successfully by solar panel owners during power outages caused by weather.
Not only would it be beneficial for you to maintain power for yourself, but there is this image that stays with me from Hurricane Sandy, and a gate with an power strip on an extension cord and a sign, "We have power. Please feel free to charge your phone."
http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cellphone-charging-new-york-620x465.jpeg
I think about that not just for the convenience of phones, but also for medications that need refrigeration, or electrical medical devices. If there are pockets of power while the grid is being repaired, that can do a lot of good.
The other thing I really want, and this is very earthquake specific, is getting the house bolted to the foundation. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and your home was built after 1978, this should already have been done. There are a lot of houses still in use that were built before then. My entire block and most of the nearby houses fall into that category.
For the structural recommendations that they make, a lot of them end up getting made with regular maintenance. Your water heater gets replaced every twelve years or so, and now it should be raised and strapped into place automatically. Roofs last longer, but if you have a house from before 1978, odds are good that the roof has been replaced at least once, and when mine was the chimney was reinforced. Bolting the house to the foundation doesn't neatly fold in with any other maintenance - it's something you just have to decide to do and do it.
(The other thing that is often mentioned is bracing the cripple wall, which would make sense to do at the same time as the bolting.)
Unfortunately, the basic quote that I got for bolting the house comes in at around $4000. (I could probably get it done for $3800.) I do not have that kind of money available.
I have to admit that looking at the instructions for doing so, it does seem like a project with strong do-it-yourself potential if you have any ability at all in that direction. I don't really, but there are people who do.
You can do some preliminary reading at http://www.earthquakesafety.com/earthquake-retrofitting.html, but I also recommend Living With Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest by Robert S Yeats. In addition to talking about bolting and structural reinforcements there is also practical information on non-structural improvements, like cabinet latches and shelving paper.
In the meantime, as so much of the past few weeks has focused on working together, it does make me wonder if there are ways neighborhoods could come together and get collective deals on panel installation or retrofitting. Maybe a few people with home improvement know-how could combine with neighbors who know less but are still willing to help, and make an entire neighborhood stronger.
Not all pockets of power have to be electrical in nature.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Cascadia Megaquake - Making things happen
I know a lot of people found "Unprepared" sobering, and that's fair, but I also found many reasons to be optimistic.
First of all I did not know that it was possible to fight liquefaction. I had never seen compaction grout before. Now I not only know it exists, but that it helped the Sendai airport. I did know that the Portland airport is in the liquefaction zone, so knowing there are options there is huge. Retrofitting at least a few runways would be a major boon if you want to be able to receive relief supplies.
Obviously it's not the only thing; if you can get the planes to land, but then don't have options to get trucks in or out, it's limited usefulness, but technology has found some amazing solutions. Seeing the hospital foundation built on springs, my first thought was that it didn't seem practical, but watching the side by side videos of how the building withstands the quake, that is amazing. There are options out there. Of course there is a problem with getting people to pay for it.
This is the other side of reaching out that I mentioned last week. There are a lot of things that can be done if popular support and political will can be mustered.
Not everything is huge. Through teachers and parents at Sunnyside school they have made some good strides. Retrofitting a building is expensive, but installing straps on cabinets to keep them from falling over and latches on the doors to keep items from falling out is much less expensive, and that will save lives. Getting the emergency buckets in each room, including class lists, and drilling the staff and students regularly, not only increases safety but will increase calm and a feeling of organization. Any parent teacher coalition should be able to take similar measures.
If that is all that is done, you should have a school where people are able to survive, and be ready for what comes after. The school may not be usable without massive repairs, which goes into recovery time. That requires a broader effort.
One of the communities covered was Seaside, where three out of four schools are in the tsunami zone. A proposal that seemed to have broad support ended up being defeated in an election, possibly because many of the home owners there are non-residents with vacation and rental properties. Perhaps that requires an outreach through the rental associations. Perhaps it requires applying for federal grants to secure funding that way.
My biggest concern that I had not previously considered is the Oregon Fuel Depot on the Willamette. There are old tanks full of fossil fuels in the liquefaction zone and right next to water, and it is the sole fuel location for the area. That means we are looking at twin catastrophes of a loss of fuel that will be vitally necessary and massive environmental contamination in an area that will already be under siege. Again, there is retrofitting that can be done, and could help so much. There is just not the will to do it.
This could be a good place to exert pressure. Whether that means writing to the companies and asking them to take measures, or writing to the government and getting them to exert pressure, I am not sure what will be most effective, but something needs to be done.
Companies can be encouraged to retrofit via tax incentives (though those should be written carefully to ensure that the work is actually done and done quickly). Local economies can be stimulated through construction projects. There are options here, but people need to get on it. A lot of people are, but sometimes it feels like it is just the geologists. We need more.
Here is one thought. Various areas flood regularly, including Tillamook. I had heard that this would frequently result in a loss of cows, until elevated stands were built, and the cows will go up and escape the flood waters.
I know that people take recurring losses of assets more seriously than future potential losses, so I understand the difference, but there is another lesson there. If you give cows a way to save themselves they will do it. Humans should be able to figure it out.
First of all I did not know that it was possible to fight liquefaction. I had never seen compaction grout before. Now I not only know it exists, but that it helped the Sendai airport. I did know that the Portland airport is in the liquefaction zone, so knowing there are options there is huge. Retrofitting at least a few runways would be a major boon if you want to be able to receive relief supplies.
Obviously it's not the only thing; if you can get the planes to land, but then don't have options to get trucks in or out, it's limited usefulness, but technology has found some amazing solutions. Seeing the hospital foundation built on springs, my first thought was that it didn't seem practical, but watching the side by side videos of how the building withstands the quake, that is amazing. There are options out there. Of course there is a problem with getting people to pay for it.
This is the other side of reaching out that I mentioned last week. There are a lot of things that can be done if popular support and political will can be mustered.
Not everything is huge. Through teachers and parents at Sunnyside school they have made some good strides. Retrofitting a building is expensive, but installing straps on cabinets to keep them from falling over and latches on the doors to keep items from falling out is much less expensive, and that will save lives. Getting the emergency buckets in each room, including class lists, and drilling the staff and students regularly, not only increases safety but will increase calm and a feeling of organization. Any parent teacher coalition should be able to take similar measures.
If that is all that is done, you should have a school where people are able to survive, and be ready for what comes after. The school may not be usable without massive repairs, which goes into recovery time. That requires a broader effort.
One of the communities covered was Seaside, where three out of four schools are in the tsunami zone. A proposal that seemed to have broad support ended up being defeated in an election, possibly because many of the home owners there are non-residents with vacation and rental properties. Perhaps that requires an outreach through the rental associations. Perhaps it requires applying for federal grants to secure funding that way.
My biggest concern that I had not previously considered is the Oregon Fuel Depot on the Willamette. There are old tanks full of fossil fuels in the liquefaction zone and right next to water, and it is the sole fuel location for the area. That means we are looking at twin catastrophes of a loss of fuel that will be vitally necessary and massive environmental contamination in an area that will already be under siege. Again, there is retrofitting that can be done, and could help so much. There is just not the will to do it.
This could be a good place to exert pressure. Whether that means writing to the companies and asking them to take measures, or writing to the government and getting them to exert pressure, I am not sure what will be most effective, but something needs to be done.
Companies can be encouraged to retrofit via tax incentives (though those should be written carefully to ensure that the work is actually done and done quickly). Local economies can be stimulated through construction projects. There are options here, but people need to get on it. A lot of people are, but sometimes it feels like it is just the geologists. We need more.
Here is one thought. Various areas flood regularly, including Tillamook. I had heard that this would frequently result in a loss of cows, until elevated stands were built, and the cows will go up and escape the flood waters.
I know that people take recurring losses of assets more seriously than future potential losses, so I understand the difference, but there is another lesson there. If you give cows a way to save themselves they will do it. Humans should be able to figure it out.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Cascadia Megaquake - Asking around
This goes back to the previous round of writing. If you will recall, I said I had written to the emergency manager for my work to ask about our contingency plans, but also that there were other places I wanted to write. I did that.
This is in keeping with the realization that personal preparedness - while very important - is insufficient for the region. Thinking about what would be needed for recovery, I was primarily focusing on what would be needed to keep the workforce functioning so we could avoid the economic collapse predicted by The New Yorker.
What do businesses need? They need electricity, obviously, and that led to utilities in general. It may be more obvious that no one in the building can work without electricity, but if you have power without water, there are hygiene issues with opening the building. If you have power but no heat, because the heat is gas, that may be a health risk, depending on the time of year. That was a good reason to check with PGE, NW Natural Gas, and Tualatin Valley Water District. I know there are other utility companies in the region, but these are the companies my household writes checks to, so I wrote to them.
There were two other things that came to mind where I did not write. One is internet. Yes, electricity will get the computers turned on, but so much of what they do now is web-based that connectivity is huge. I could still write to Comcast and ask for the sake of my household, but I was focusing on business needs, and I don't know enough about what companies they are likely to use, and if there are ways in which the connections are different. It's worth looking into.
The other message I didn't write was to the garbage company, because it felt like a big part of their ability to function would depend on the roads. I wrote to ODOT instead. Then, because that got me into government, I decided to check in with Metro, because their whole thing is getting different parts of the region to function together, so they could be very helpful in getting regional preparedness going.
Most of the answers were very positive.
Metro
Metro does coordinate with local and state governments and emergency preparedness agencies to plan for disaster relief efforts. We are a member of the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization and have been working on a disaster debris plan for many years. We are also involved in the Cascadia Rising earthquake simulation exercise in June 2016 which will test the coordination and emergency response efforts of many organizations.
Tualatin Valley Water District
They were my favorite. Not only are they partnering with Hillsboro to develop a third water supply for backup, obtaining portable distribution systems, strengthening infrastructure and participating in drills, but when I wrote they were working on an article to send to their customers to keep them informed. That is what I call doing everything right. You can read more about some of their work at
ODOT
Also a favorite. They are also participating in drills and planning, working with their employees on individual preparedness so that their workforce will be ready, and thinking strategically with locating supplies where they will have access regardless of transportation issues. One thing they pointed out is that with a lot of their normal responses to landslides and storms, they are dealing with similar situations to what an earthquake will create. They are also looking at getting the infrastructure more earthquake ready.
NW Natural Gas
They were my least favorite. They kept returning to their personal preparedness information, and then to what to do during an earthquake, when I was specifically asking about recovery. Eventually they said that they could not predict recovery time without knowing how big it ended up being, but forecasting is how you prepare. I do appreciate that they have procedures in place for keeping everything from burning up, because that is important, and fires would make recovery worse, but the final answer and the process for getting it were both frustrating.
PGE
Actually, the automated form did not understand my question. I should have followed up and called, but since at that time I knew I was going to wait for "Unprepared" to start writing about earthquakes again, I put that on hold.
Are we perfect regionally? No, but we knew that. What the article missed is that there are people working on it, and they can do some pretty impressive things. If everyone works on it, we have a pretty good shot.
These questions are good for finding out information, but to get everyone working together on preparedness, it may also take some reaching out to exert pressure. More on that next week.
This is in keeping with the realization that personal preparedness - while very important - is insufficient for the region. Thinking about what would be needed for recovery, I was primarily focusing on what would be needed to keep the workforce functioning so we could avoid the economic collapse predicted by The New Yorker.
What do businesses need? They need electricity, obviously, and that led to utilities in general. It may be more obvious that no one in the building can work without electricity, but if you have power without water, there are hygiene issues with opening the building. If you have power but no heat, because the heat is gas, that may be a health risk, depending on the time of year. That was a good reason to check with PGE, NW Natural Gas, and Tualatin Valley Water District. I know there are other utility companies in the region, but these are the companies my household writes checks to, so I wrote to them.
There were two other things that came to mind where I did not write. One is internet. Yes, electricity will get the computers turned on, but so much of what they do now is web-based that connectivity is huge. I could still write to Comcast and ask for the sake of my household, but I was focusing on business needs, and I don't know enough about what companies they are likely to use, and if there are ways in which the connections are different. It's worth looking into.
The other message I didn't write was to the garbage company, because it felt like a big part of their ability to function would depend on the roads. I wrote to ODOT instead. Then, because that got me into government, I decided to check in with Metro, because their whole thing is getting different parts of the region to function together, so they could be very helpful in getting regional preparedness going.
Most of the answers were very positive.
Metro
Metro does coordinate with local and state governments and emergency preparedness agencies to plan for disaster relief efforts. We are a member of the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization and have been working on a disaster debris plan for many years. We are also involved in the Cascadia Rising earthquake simulation exercise in June 2016 which will test the coordination and emergency response efforts of many organizations.
Tualatin Valley Water District
They were my favorite. Not only are they partnering with Hillsboro to develop a third water supply for backup, obtaining portable distribution systems, strengthening infrastructure and participating in drills, but when I wrote they were working on an article to send to their customers to keep them informed. That is what I call doing everything right. You can read more about some of their work at
www.OurReliableWater.org.
ODOT
Also a favorite. They are also participating in drills and planning, working with their employees on individual preparedness so that their workforce will be ready, and thinking strategically with locating supplies where they will have access regardless of transportation issues. One thing they pointed out is that with a lot of their normal responses to landslides and storms, they are dealing with similar situations to what an earthquake will create. They are also looking at getting the infrastructure more earthquake ready.
NW Natural Gas
They were my least favorite. They kept returning to their personal preparedness information, and then to what to do during an earthquake, when I was specifically asking about recovery. Eventually they said that they could not predict recovery time without knowing how big it ended up being, but forecasting is how you prepare. I do appreciate that they have procedures in place for keeping everything from burning up, because that is important, and fires would make recovery worse, but the final answer and the process for getting it were both frustrating.
PGE
Actually, the automated form did not understand my question. I should have followed up and called, but since at that time I knew I was going to wait for "Unprepared" to start writing about earthquakes again, I put that on hold.
Are we perfect regionally? No, but we knew that. What the article missed is that there are people working on it, and they can do some pretty impressive things. If everyone works on it, we have a pretty good shot.
These questions are good for finding out information, but to get everyone working together on preparedness, it may also take some reaching out to exert pressure. More on that next week.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Togetherness
I said last week that we would get back to earthquakes this week, but I suspect that the majority of my readers for this blog are LDS, and thus focusing on Conference this weekend. It has certainly affected my schedule. So, here is a thought via Conference and building on some of my recent reading that will lead us nicely into the earthquake section.
When they keep going back and forth between Oregon and Japan in "Unprepared", it is not just to show us how devastating an earthquake and tsunami can be (though it can be pretty effective for that) but also to show us the benefits of preparing in advance. There is a lot of mitigation that can be done.
I was talking with a friend Thursday night after watching part of the special about how much can be done, and she pointed out how a lot of the things that could have been done already and were suggested are not being done because no one wants to pay for it. Yes, lots of areas are cash-strapped, but there is also an issue with our rugged individualistic history of not wanting to give anyone else handouts, even if it is something that would be better for society.
I am also currently reading The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard G. Williamson and Kate Pickett. The book goes through various studies and shows that for pretty much all measurements of quality of life and social ills, the societies that are more equal have it better across the board. In a country with high inequality the rich are healthier than the poor, and the poor in the more equal society have a higher level of benefit than the rich, but even the rich in the more equal society do better.
That shouldn't be at all surprising, really, and I am sure I will get back to it, but it makes it very unsurprising to find that Japan is one of the most equal societies, and also the one that is so capable of doing advance preparations for earthquakes that not only save lives during the earthquake but improve things after. They're not perfect, but when our megaquake comes we are going to want their level of preparation.
My thought from conference is that when we worry about temptation and corruption, we tend to think about sexual sin and Word of Wisdom issues, and probably most of us are past that. Things happen, but if you are a stable adult who has been living the Word of Wisdom and Law of Chastity for life, chances are good that you we be able to keep that up. There are strong components of habit for them, and to get where they are real temptations several other things would probably have to happen first.
This may not be true for your teenage children, but helping them build a relationship with God and understand the values of those laws will be more beneficial for them than limiting their contact with non-members, which is often a temptation.
That's the temptation I want to get to. There are commandments that focus on purity, and they are important, but we should be easily able to see when we are breaking them.
There are more commandments that focus on charity, and there are many scriptures reminding us how important it is, but letting our hearts get hard is easy to miss. Just the process of hardening makes us less sensitive, and the more we shut ourselves off from anyone different from us, the less opportunities we have to feel out the boundaries of our hearts.
So when the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats focuses on the service we give, including to people in prison who might reasonably be considered "undesirable", and when invited guests are not ready for the bridegroom because they lack oil, I feel it is more likely to be a problem of hard hearts.
I am especially concerned with that now because of the presidential election (something else I am sure I will get back to). A movie I saw recently showed me something of the unexpected reach of rhetoric. We have already seen attacks on real human beings inspired by Trump. He is the most blatant in his hatred, but many of the other candidates still focus on all of the other people who are problems, dividing it into "us" and "them".
This is not the way of the Gospel, and it is not the way into a better society, not the way into a more prepared one.
Yes, the earthquake section will show a specific need for the people of the Pacific Northwest to come together, but there is a need for togetherness that goes further than that, and deeper, and pursuing it can helps us develop our most essential spiritual quality.
That's something to think about. Then, when you are ready to apply that to Cascadia, look here:
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
When they keep going back and forth between Oregon and Japan in "Unprepared", it is not just to show us how devastating an earthquake and tsunami can be (though it can be pretty effective for that) but also to show us the benefits of preparing in advance. There is a lot of mitigation that can be done.
I was talking with a friend Thursday night after watching part of the special about how much can be done, and she pointed out how a lot of the things that could have been done already and were suggested are not being done because no one wants to pay for it. Yes, lots of areas are cash-strapped, but there is also an issue with our rugged individualistic history of not wanting to give anyone else handouts, even if it is something that would be better for society.
I am also currently reading The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard G. Williamson and Kate Pickett. The book goes through various studies and shows that for pretty much all measurements of quality of life and social ills, the societies that are more equal have it better across the board. In a country with high inequality the rich are healthier than the poor, and the poor in the more equal society have a higher level of benefit than the rich, but even the rich in the more equal society do better.
That shouldn't be at all surprising, really, and I am sure I will get back to it, but it makes it very unsurprising to find that Japan is one of the most equal societies, and also the one that is so capable of doing advance preparations for earthquakes that not only save lives during the earthquake but improve things after. They're not perfect, but when our megaquake comes we are going to want their level of preparation.
My thought from conference is that when we worry about temptation and corruption, we tend to think about sexual sin and Word of Wisdom issues, and probably most of us are past that. Things happen, but if you are a stable adult who has been living the Word of Wisdom and Law of Chastity for life, chances are good that you we be able to keep that up. There are strong components of habit for them, and to get where they are real temptations several other things would probably have to happen first.
This may not be true for your teenage children, but helping them build a relationship with God and understand the values of those laws will be more beneficial for them than limiting their contact with non-members, which is often a temptation.
That's the temptation I want to get to. There are commandments that focus on purity, and they are important, but we should be easily able to see when we are breaking them.
There are more commandments that focus on charity, and there are many scriptures reminding us how important it is, but letting our hearts get hard is easy to miss. Just the process of hardening makes us less sensitive, and the more we shut ourselves off from anyone different from us, the less opportunities we have to feel out the boundaries of our hearts.
So when the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats focuses on the service we give, including to people in prison who might reasonably be considered "undesirable", and when invited guests are not ready for the bridegroom because they lack oil, I feel it is more likely to be a problem of hard hearts.
I am especially concerned with that now because of the presidential election (something else I am sure I will get back to). A movie I saw recently showed me something of the unexpected reach of rhetoric. We have already seen attacks on real human beings inspired by Trump. He is the most blatant in his hatred, but many of the other candidates still focus on all of the other people who are problems, dividing it into "us" and "them".
This is not the way of the Gospel, and it is not the way into a better society, not the way into a more prepared one.
Yes, the earthquake section will show a specific need for the people of the Pacific Northwest to come together, but there is a need for togetherness that goes further than that, and deeper, and pursuing it can helps us develop our most essential spiritual quality.
That's something to think about. Then, when you are ready to apply that to Cascadia, look here:
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Breast Implants
Recently there was an article examining "the modern dating crisis" by examining Mormons and Orthodox Jews:
http://time.com/dateonomics/
It did have some interesting information, though the research didn't feel intellectually vigorous. At least for me, part of that is knowing that a large part of the breast implant market in Utah consists of married women. I'm not sure that's so much about dating.
The premise of the article is that because men outnumber women in the dating pools of these religious groups, thus having more options, this puts extra pressure on the women to increase their desirability. There is pressure on the physical appearance of the Orthodox Jewish women too, but there has also been a huge increase in the use of dowries, and their relative value. Apparently in Mormon culture there is only the focus on appearance, hence breast implants.
The article mentions at least one patient who is getting implants because her boyfriend would like them bigger (also, the plastic surgeon mentioned sees a lot of college age women coming in for Botox injections), so it's not that unmarried woman are not affected. Still, there are a lot of housewives getting the procedure too.
That is probably not completely unrelated. The ads are there for everyone to see, so even if they are geared toward one demographic, they could affect another.
There is a very interesting article on the topic at http://www.beautyredefined.net/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-salt-lake-city-is-vainest-of-them-all/, which lets us know - among other things - that Salt Lake City earned the title "Vainest City in the Nation" in 2007, based on an index of plastic surgeons per capita and spending on beauty products.
Vanity is not a Young Women value. It's not a Gospel value. It should not be something we want any of our women to aspire to. But if we tell them that they have to be attractive, and then our messages that are purportedly about other things - like modesty - still focus on the appearance of the girls, that is a likely result.
Then, if they succeed too well in being attractive, it becomes so easy to modesty-shame them.
- "That top is too tight."
- "It wasn't before the implants."
Initially my concerns with the modesty shaming was that it can alienate people who may forget that the Church is true if they find enough members being jerks. That is a concern, but even without that, this seems like a concept destined to make women neurotic and keep them from discovering their true potential.
I'd call it manure, but manure can at least produce good results. This is toxic.
I'm do have some thoughts about how focusing on service and charity, gratitude, and developing your own talents while appreciating the talents of others would do a lot more to foster true modesty anyway, but these attitudes aren't about modesty anyway. They are about keeping women down, and modesty-shaming allows women to also have a position above someone else. When your heart is right, there probably are some clothes you won't wear, but you're not going to care a lot about what other people are wearing.
That's all I have to say on this for now. Oregon Field Guide's "Unprepared" airs October 1st at 8 PM on OPB. You can watch it online too. Check it out, and then we will go back to talking about earthquakes.
(Actually, not just earthquakes; megaquakes. In fact, the megaquake. Yeah, be ready for that.)
http://time.com/dateonomics/
It did have some interesting information, though the research didn't feel intellectually vigorous. At least for me, part of that is knowing that a large part of the breast implant market in Utah consists of married women. I'm not sure that's so much about dating.
The premise of the article is that because men outnumber women in the dating pools of these religious groups, thus having more options, this puts extra pressure on the women to increase their desirability. There is pressure on the physical appearance of the Orthodox Jewish women too, but there has also been a huge increase in the use of dowries, and their relative value. Apparently in Mormon culture there is only the focus on appearance, hence breast implants.
The article mentions at least one patient who is getting implants because her boyfriend would like them bigger (also, the plastic surgeon mentioned sees a lot of college age women coming in for Botox injections), so it's not that unmarried woman are not affected. Still, there are a lot of housewives getting the procedure too.
That is probably not completely unrelated. The ads are there for everyone to see, so even if they are geared toward one demographic, they could affect another.
There is a very interesting article on the topic at http://www.beautyredefined.net/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-salt-lake-city-is-vainest-of-them-all/, which lets us know - among other things - that Salt Lake City earned the title "Vainest City in the Nation" in 2007, based on an index of plastic surgeons per capita and spending on beauty products.
Vanity is not a Young Women value. It's not a Gospel value. It should not be something we want any of our women to aspire to. But if we tell them that they have to be attractive, and then our messages that are purportedly about other things - like modesty - still focus on the appearance of the girls, that is a likely result.
Then, if they succeed too well in being attractive, it becomes so easy to modesty-shame them.
- "That top is too tight."
- "It wasn't before the implants."
Initially my concerns with the modesty shaming was that it can alienate people who may forget that the Church is true if they find enough members being jerks. That is a concern, but even without that, this seems like a concept destined to make women neurotic and keep them from discovering their true potential.
I'd call it manure, but manure can at least produce good results. This is toxic.
I'm do have some thoughts about how focusing on service and charity, gratitude, and developing your own talents while appreciating the talents of others would do a lot more to foster true modesty anyway, but these attitudes aren't about modesty anyway. They are about keeping women down, and modesty-shaming allows women to also have a position above someone else. When your heart is right, there probably are some clothes you won't wear, but you're not going to care a lot about what other people are wearing.
That's all I have to say on this for now. Oregon Field Guide's "Unprepared" airs October 1st at 8 PM on OPB. You can watch it online too. Check it out, and then we will go back to talking about earthquakes.
(Actually, not just earthquakes; megaquakes. In fact, the megaquake. Yeah, be ready for that.)
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Tradition
When I was around third grade a Pakistani family moved in next door. They were the first Muslims I had ever met.
The mother was not allowed to show her legs because of modesty. The oldest daughter was getting close to where she would be of an age to think about that (I believe it was 12). As her mother was American, and not Muslim, I was not sure that she would adhere. There was some potential for friction there, and eventually she started visiting her father less, though that was not necessarily the cause.
We met three other Pakistani families through them, and they all followed the same rules for modesty, focusing on adult women having their legs covered.
My religion believed in modesty too, so I related to that. Their rule was stricter than ours, because Mormon women can wear shorts, but in terms of modesty in dress being important, more emphasis on it approaching adulthood, and a higher burden on women than on men, it was pretty similar.
Years later seeing hijab, niqab, and burqas, it looked like Pakistani women had gotten off easy, but I have seen Pakistani women wearing head coverings as well. Perhaps it is different if you are rural or urban. There were also times when clothing rules changed drastically in Iran and Afghanistan, based in changes in power.
I concluded that often rules of modesty might be based more on tradition than religious doctrine. That would not be at all surprising. Local climate influences dress, and availability of materials, and habits can be strong.
I don't want to sound disrespectful at all in my writing. One young friend recently defended hijab - which she wears - as a way of keeping people from judging you by your looks so they will focus on your mind instead. There is value in that. People do focus on looks too much.
I can see her point, but I also remember Marji making fun of the sexuality that radiates from a woman's hair in Persepolis, and that with hijab people can still judge your face (which does look better framed by hair), and that people are free to judge her father on his looks since he does not have to wear it.
Modesty is a good trait, and so many good things can be said about it. There is also a lot to be said for not making everything sexual, or having women compete to attract, or for reducing women to their very dangerous looks. I am afraid though that much of what we do in the name of modesty flies specifically counter to that.
And now I am talking about Mormons again, but more on that next week.
The mother was not allowed to show her legs because of modesty. The oldest daughter was getting close to where she would be of an age to think about that (I believe it was 12). As her mother was American, and not Muslim, I was not sure that she would adhere. There was some potential for friction there, and eventually she started visiting her father less, though that was not necessarily the cause.
We met three other Pakistani families through them, and they all followed the same rules for modesty, focusing on adult women having their legs covered.
My religion believed in modesty too, so I related to that. Their rule was stricter than ours, because Mormon women can wear shorts, but in terms of modesty in dress being important, more emphasis on it approaching adulthood, and a higher burden on women than on men, it was pretty similar.
Years later seeing hijab, niqab, and burqas, it looked like Pakistani women had gotten off easy, but I have seen Pakistani women wearing head coverings as well. Perhaps it is different if you are rural or urban. There were also times when clothing rules changed drastically in Iran and Afghanistan, based in changes in power.
I concluded that often rules of modesty might be based more on tradition than religious doctrine. That would not be at all surprising. Local climate influences dress, and availability of materials, and habits can be strong.
I don't want to sound disrespectful at all in my writing. One young friend recently defended hijab - which she wears - as a way of keeping people from judging you by your looks so they will focus on your mind instead. There is value in that. People do focus on looks too much.
I can see her point, but I also remember Marji making fun of the sexuality that radiates from a woman's hair in Persepolis, and that with hijab people can still judge your face (which does look better framed by hair), and that people are free to judge her father on his looks since he does not have to wear it.
Modesty is a good trait, and so many good things can be said about it. There is also a lot to be said for not making everything sexual, or having women compete to attract, or for reducing women to their very dangerous looks. I am afraid though that much of what we do in the name of modesty flies specifically counter to that.
And now I am talking about Mormons again, but more on that next week.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
False modesty
I have been getting very irritated with talk of "modesty" lately. Let me start with a little story:
http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/women-denied-palais-entry-for-wearing-flats/5088395.article?referrer=RSS
This may seem like it has nothing to do with modesty, but the element of inspection reminded me of another story I had recently heard of women back in the day having to kneel to demonstrate that their skirts were long enough, based on whether their hems touched the floor or not.
Allow me to suggest that if that is necessary to tell if the skirt is long enough, it's long enough.
The common factor is that the female body is subject to inspection. Once that is expected, the criteria can become increasingly arbitrary and ridiculous. A heel does not automatically make a shoe beautiful - some heels are really tacky. Many shoes are hidden by the gown length anyway. (I believe I read something about some women being asked to raise their skirts slightly so the heels could be checked.)
Therefore you can decide that even if a girl's collarbone is currently covered, the possibility of the sweater that is covering the collarbone being removed is reason enough to decide that the shirt is still inappropriate enough to send her home.
This teaches our young women two things: their bodies are shameful things and they are not capable of making their own decisions on what is appropriate. Because the reasons their bodies must be hidden are so frequently centered around distractions for the boys, girls are also taught that it is not about them. Even something as basic as what she puts on in the morning is not about her. Finally, though clearly the problem is how easily distracted and low-minded boys are, it is the responsibility of the girls to fix it.
Sadly, she is still required to be attractive, but not attractive in a way that violates the prevailing ill-conceived rules about what is and is not acceptable. Yoga pants cover the legs up, but too closely. Tight sweaters are okay if the bra doesn't show through. And seriously, when did collarbones become sexualized?
This is not about modesty, or respect, or any of the things they say it is. This is about controlling women. This is about patriarchy. No matter how many women help uphold the crooked system, it remains crooked.
This is the kind of mindset that leads to modesty-shaming, where a young woman at girls camp might be shamed for wearing capris and a sleeved t-shirt because the sleeve ends above her elbow and the shorts don't go far enough past her knee. I saw the picture, she was fine. She was also in a place where there are no boys, but still, how dare she have any skin other than her neck and face showing! Now we just need to decide that the neck and face are also evil so that we can require burqas and be done with it.
I was reading the Pauline Epistles lately, and if anyone is going to say something that sounds stupid and sexist it will be Paul. You know what he says about modesty and women? Don't spend too much time on your hair.
Fixating on clothes would be immodest. The path that we are on is one that will require young women to spend far too much time worrying about clothes, and they won't have any fun with it, but it will at least provide plenty of opportunities for judgment and alienation.
If we can't do better than that on modesty we should quite talking about it. We should at least understand it before we try and teach the young poeple how to do it.
http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/women-denied-palais-entry-for-wearing-flats/5088395.article?referrer=RSS
This may seem like it has nothing to do with modesty, but the element of inspection reminded me of another story I had recently heard of women back in the day having to kneel to demonstrate that their skirts were long enough, based on whether their hems touched the floor or not.
Allow me to suggest that if that is necessary to tell if the skirt is long enough, it's long enough.
The common factor is that the female body is subject to inspection. Once that is expected, the criteria can become increasingly arbitrary and ridiculous. A heel does not automatically make a shoe beautiful - some heels are really tacky. Many shoes are hidden by the gown length anyway. (I believe I read something about some women being asked to raise their skirts slightly so the heels could be checked.)
Therefore you can decide that even if a girl's collarbone is currently covered, the possibility of the sweater that is covering the collarbone being removed is reason enough to decide that the shirt is still inappropriate enough to send her home.
This teaches our young women two things: their bodies are shameful things and they are not capable of making their own decisions on what is appropriate. Because the reasons their bodies must be hidden are so frequently centered around distractions for the boys, girls are also taught that it is not about them. Even something as basic as what she puts on in the morning is not about her. Finally, though clearly the problem is how easily distracted and low-minded boys are, it is the responsibility of the girls to fix it.
Sadly, she is still required to be attractive, but not attractive in a way that violates the prevailing ill-conceived rules about what is and is not acceptable. Yoga pants cover the legs up, but too closely. Tight sweaters are okay if the bra doesn't show through. And seriously, when did collarbones become sexualized?
This is not about modesty, or respect, or any of the things they say it is. This is about controlling women. This is about patriarchy. No matter how many women help uphold the crooked system, it remains crooked.
This is the kind of mindset that leads to modesty-shaming, where a young woman at girls camp might be shamed for wearing capris and a sleeved t-shirt because the sleeve ends above her elbow and the shorts don't go far enough past her knee. I saw the picture, she was fine. She was also in a place where there are no boys, but still, how dare she have any skin other than her neck and face showing! Now we just need to decide that the neck and face are also evil so that we can require burqas and be done with it.
I was reading the Pauline Epistles lately, and if anyone is going to say something that sounds stupid and sexist it will be Paul. You know what he says about modesty and women? Don't spend too much time on your hair.
Fixating on clothes would be immodest. The path that we are on is one that will require young women to spend far too much time worrying about clothes, and they won't have any fun with it, but it will at least provide plenty of opportunities for judgment and alienation.
If we can't do better than that on modesty we should quite talking about it. We should at least understand it before we try and teach the young poeple how to do it.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Mormons and consent
Conversations about consent are becoming more common, and they are necessary to overcoming rape culture.
If that phrase startles you, well, this is mature content. I'm not going to be tawdry at any point, but I will be frank.
It is easy for active members to feel like we don't have a part in this conversation - if you're not married, you shouldn't be having sex. That may seem like we cannot make any contributions other than hypothetical. That is a mistake.
First of all, obviously Mormons have sex all the time. At church I see pregnant women, babies, and little children everywhere. Sex has played a big part in that.
Consent matters for married couples. Imagine a night where a chaste married couple is going to bed. He wants to have sex, but she doesn't.
Once upon a time, the husband forcing sex would not have been legally considered rape. It could have left some of the same scars on the wife, and it wouldn't have been a building block in a healthy respectful relationship though.
Let's say this husband would never force sex, but he shames her for not being there for his needs, when her job is to sustain and serve him; after all, it is his work that provides their house and all the nice things they have, and lets her stay home with the kids. She feels like dirt and gives in, then feels worse.
This would also not be considered rape, but it is still not a healthy relationship building block. The husband shows a lack of respect for the wife and her needs, and it is selfishness on his part. Sometimes when people talk about enthusiastic consent, they mean things like this. A person can not want it but still not fight it, for a variety of reasons.
I suspect another common scenario could be the wife not really feeling like it, but making herself available for feelings of obligation - perhaps she thinks of England while she does her wifely duty - but that, while better, is still not as good as it could be.
If both the husband and wife care about each others' needs, communication can help a lot. Then you can discuss the tiredness, and look for ways to relieve some of the burden. You can decide on morning sex instead of evening sex so everyone gets a fresh start. You can realize that some positions are not enjoyed as much as others and accommodate that.
I could go on in that vein, though we might start to venture into the tawdry, and really, that's not necessary. There is information on there on specific ways to increase your pleasure and on improving communication, which is often a good thing to do regardless.
No, my point here is one of equality. The reason it wasn't a crime to rape your wife is because she was yours; if she wasn't quite a much a piece of property as your table, she surely wasn't as much of a person as a man. There was tradition in that, but is has never been God's way.
The importance of establishing consent is that both people have to be free to say no before their yes can matter. That is partly that sex is very intimate, and can thus become very degrading when not wanted, but also because both parties need to have rights. They need to be equal.
It should be obvious that the right to not feel violated supersedes the right to have sex. The temporary frustration of not getting satisfied one way does not linger like the regret of acquiescing when you didn't want to, or burn like being forced when you didn't acquiesce. If your thought to concerns on the part of the other party is to get over it and it is no big deal, you do not deserve sex and I hope your partner sees that. Sex is a big deal.
So we should be able to talk about it. We should be able to know what the good parts of doing it are, and how it can go horribly wrong, and how a couple can work to make it more enjoyable for both of them.
We need that, because both people matter. Both parties are equally valuable. My examples have focused on reluctance on the part of the woman, because historically she has been the one most likely to lack status, but it works both ways. No woman should guilt or drug or intimidate a man into sex either. We believe in love and respect and kindness for all people.
So keep that in mind, and we will use it to take another look at modesty next week.
If that phrase startles you, well, this is mature content. I'm not going to be tawdry at any point, but I will be frank.
It is easy for active members to feel like we don't have a part in this conversation - if you're not married, you shouldn't be having sex. That may seem like we cannot make any contributions other than hypothetical. That is a mistake.
First of all, obviously Mormons have sex all the time. At church I see pregnant women, babies, and little children everywhere. Sex has played a big part in that.
Consent matters for married couples. Imagine a night where a chaste married couple is going to bed. He wants to have sex, but she doesn't.
Once upon a time, the husband forcing sex would not have been legally considered rape. It could have left some of the same scars on the wife, and it wouldn't have been a building block in a healthy respectful relationship though.
Let's say this husband would never force sex, but he shames her for not being there for his needs, when her job is to sustain and serve him; after all, it is his work that provides their house and all the nice things they have, and lets her stay home with the kids. She feels like dirt and gives in, then feels worse.
This would also not be considered rape, but it is still not a healthy relationship building block. The husband shows a lack of respect for the wife and her needs, and it is selfishness on his part. Sometimes when people talk about enthusiastic consent, they mean things like this. A person can not want it but still not fight it, for a variety of reasons.
I suspect another common scenario could be the wife not really feeling like it, but making herself available for feelings of obligation - perhaps she thinks of England while she does her wifely duty - but that, while better, is still not as good as it could be.
If both the husband and wife care about each others' needs, communication can help a lot. Then you can discuss the tiredness, and look for ways to relieve some of the burden. You can decide on morning sex instead of evening sex so everyone gets a fresh start. You can realize that some positions are not enjoyed as much as others and accommodate that.
I could go on in that vein, though we might start to venture into the tawdry, and really, that's not necessary. There is information on there on specific ways to increase your pleasure and on improving communication, which is often a good thing to do regardless.
No, my point here is one of equality. The reason it wasn't a crime to rape your wife is because she was yours; if she wasn't quite a much a piece of property as your table, she surely wasn't as much of a person as a man. There was tradition in that, but is has never been God's way.
The importance of establishing consent is that both people have to be free to say no before their yes can matter. That is partly that sex is very intimate, and can thus become very degrading when not wanted, but also because both parties need to have rights. They need to be equal.
It should be obvious that the right to not feel violated supersedes the right to have sex. The temporary frustration of not getting satisfied one way does not linger like the regret of acquiescing when you didn't want to, or burn like being forced when you didn't acquiesce. If your thought to concerns on the part of the other party is to get over it and it is no big deal, you do not deserve sex and I hope your partner sees that. Sex is a big deal.
So we should be able to talk about it. We should be able to know what the good parts of doing it are, and how it can go horribly wrong, and how a couple can work to make it more enjoyable for both of them.
We need that, because both people matter. Both parties are equally valuable. My examples have focused on reluctance on the part of the woman, because historically she has been the one most likely to lack status, but it works both ways. No woman should guilt or drug or intimidate a man into sex either. We believe in love and respect and kindness for all people.
So keep that in mind, and we will use it to take another look at modesty next week.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Ashley Madison and me
I have been very interested in this whole Ashley Madison thing.
If you aren't familiar, it is a site that people use to set up affairs, so married people can cheat discreetly. At least, that seems to be the specialty. I don't think you have to be married to use it. Their data was hacked and being released.
Initially I had never heard of the site, and I didn't think a lot about it except that it was unfortunately that we had just named our new kitten Ashley.
Then I saw some people tweeting about how this could be very dangerous for the users. Some of them could be in abusive relationships, some might be in open marriages where it wasn't anyone's business, and while in my head there are probably still better ways to deal with it, yes, there can be some pretty difficult experiences out there, and it's not my job to judge. I heard that there have been at least two suicides related to the breach, and that may not even be the cheaters - some people finding out that they have been betrayed will feel a lot of pain from that.
None of that is to justify adultery, but the initial thing you picture when you hear about it is overly simplified, and so while many people's first response was to think this was funny, it wasn't.
There was some food for thought there, but it was other stories that fascinated me. For example, apparently Ashley Madison was trying to get the breached material that was posted online taken down using copyright law. I learned that in an article explaining why that would not work under copyright law, and that article was very well-written and informative about copyright law.
The side note from that and other articles is that apparently part of the problem is that Ashley Madison had been paid money to delete certain information and not done so, making them derelict in customer service, and probably not really on the ball in terms of basic privacy protection which is a notable failing in any service using "discreet" as a key word. There is a level on which I find myself not terribly surprised about a site set up for this purpose not behaving completely ethically and responsibly.
Now the next interesting thing may counteract the final interesting thing, but it probably doesn't all the way. Anyway, it turns out that a lot of the female profiles were fake. A lot of men thought they were talking to women, but were really talking to other men.
Whether this means that it was rare for people to progress all the way to meeting up, I don't know. Even partially pursuing the intent to cheat can cause relationship harm, so this may be bad enough. However, it is worth remembering that not everyone is who they say they are, especially online.
Last but not least is user data, some of which may be invalid. Apparently in terms of famous names that have shown up, Josh Duggar has really admitted to using it. Of course, having already admitted to molesting his sisters and a baby sitter, we may be less surprised by depravity on his part, but Christian vlogger Sam Rader also admitted to it. It's enough to make you wonder about this article:
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/slices/expert-400-church-leaders-will-resign-sunday-because-names-surfaced-ashley-madison-hack
So, when you rank the states paying for Ashley Madison, and the state paying the 8th most is Utah, well, some of those accounts could be fake, but the paid accounts might be less likely to be fake, and we have to consider it at least possible that there are many Utah users, and many of them are LDS and active.
If you recall, before I got distracted by the mega-quake article I was writing about chastity and modesty. If it was not obvious, I have decided to wait to write more on the earthquake until after Unprepared airs October 1st, so this gives us some time to talk about sex. Religious people can get weird about it, and it does not make us more righteous. It can even make it harder for us to remain righteous.
The September posts are going to try and break that down.
If you aren't familiar, it is a site that people use to set up affairs, so married people can cheat discreetly. At least, that seems to be the specialty. I don't think you have to be married to use it. Their data was hacked and being released.
Initially I had never heard of the site, and I didn't think a lot about it except that it was unfortunately that we had just named our new kitten Ashley.
Then I saw some people tweeting about how this could be very dangerous for the users. Some of them could be in abusive relationships, some might be in open marriages where it wasn't anyone's business, and while in my head there are probably still better ways to deal with it, yes, there can be some pretty difficult experiences out there, and it's not my job to judge. I heard that there have been at least two suicides related to the breach, and that may not even be the cheaters - some people finding out that they have been betrayed will feel a lot of pain from that.
None of that is to justify adultery, but the initial thing you picture when you hear about it is overly simplified, and so while many people's first response was to think this was funny, it wasn't.
There was some food for thought there, but it was other stories that fascinated me. For example, apparently Ashley Madison was trying to get the breached material that was posted online taken down using copyright law. I learned that in an article explaining why that would not work under copyright law, and that article was very well-written and informative about copyright law.
The side note from that and other articles is that apparently part of the problem is that Ashley Madison had been paid money to delete certain information and not done so, making them derelict in customer service, and probably not really on the ball in terms of basic privacy protection which is a notable failing in any service using "discreet" as a key word. There is a level on which I find myself not terribly surprised about a site set up for this purpose not behaving completely ethically and responsibly.
Now the next interesting thing may counteract the final interesting thing, but it probably doesn't all the way. Anyway, it turns out that a lot of the female profiles were fake. A lot of men thought they were talking to women, but were really talking to other men.
Whether this means that it was rare for people to progress all the way to meeting up, I don't know. Even partially pursuing the intent to cheat can cause relationship harm, so this may be bad enough. However, it is worth remembering that not everyone is who they say they are, especially online.
Last but not least is user data, some of which may be invalid. Apparently in terms of famous names that have shown up, Josh Duggar has really admitted to using it. Of course, having already admitted to molesting his sisters and a baby sitter, we may be less surprised by depravity on his part, but Christian vlogger Sam Rader also admitted to it. It's enough to make you wonder about this article:
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/slices/expert-400-church-leaders-will-resign-sunday-because-names-surfaced-ashley-madison-hack
So, when you rank the states paying for Ashley Madison, and the state paying the 8th most is Utah, well, some of those accounts could be fake, but the paid accounts might be less likely to be fake, and we have to consider it at least possible that there are many Utah users, and many of them are LDS and active.
If you recall, before I got distracted by the mega-quake article I was writing about chastity and modesty. If it was not obvious, I have decided to wait to write more on the earthquake until after Unprepared airs October 1st, so this gives us some time to talk about sex. Religious people can get weird about it, and it does not make us more righteous. It can even make it harder for us to remain righteous.
The September posts are going to try and break that down.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
2015 Garden Report
Will anyone be terribly surprised if my plans expanded beyond what I said I was going to do back in May?
I did plant the one cherry tomato plant and the one pumpkin plant. I did plant the lettuce tray. They it just didn't feel like enough.
Some of that was caused by additional research. I was looking at
companion planting charts to make sure there were no conflicts between
pumpkins and tomatoes, and I saw a note that when basil is planted with
tomatoes they grow ten percent bigger. I really wanted to check that
out, but I was only planting cherry tomatoes. Should they even grow ten
percent bigger?
Also, as I looked up the pumpkin type that I had got, Spirit, it seemed like they wouldn't be big producers. It might be a good idea to get another one. I went to the garden center searching for two more tomato plants (because I had two more tomato cages), a basil plant, and one more Spirit pumpkin.
The pumpkin plants were completely gone, and I had no idea there were so many types of basil. I went with Sweet Italian because that seemed most likely to have a kinship with me. For tomatoes I got one Early Girl (I have always been fond of that breed) and one Jet Star, because that's Ray Toro's Danger Days alter ego and that was awesome.
Ultimately, I probably should have stuck with one tomato and one pumpkin.
The lettuce tray never did a single sprout. I am not sure how it managed to fail so badly.
Jet Star only had one tomato, and Early Girl looks like there will be a total of six when the rest ripen. Those are both good breeds, so I am wondering if they were just put in bad spots. I did add plant food and egg shells to the soil, but they are closer to the concrete and their spots did not have the soil worked as much by the ivy. Maybe it was the exact wrong kind of basil.
(Incidentally, I keep finding new ivy sprouts in odd places. I suspect that will go on for a while.)
I also for a long time only had one pumpkin.
Even without the crookneck squash encroaching, I guess pumpkin fertilization is not a guarantee. You see, pumpkin blossoms are gendered. You get a lot more male blossoms, and you need more quantitatively, but you still need some female blossoms, because only they will become pumpkins.
A female blossom is recognizable by the green knob at the base of the flower. If she gets fertilized, that know grows bigger, and a darker striped green, then keeps getting bigger and turns orange. (Well, the color changes can be different for different breeds, but that's how mine went.)
If the blossom doesn't get fertilized, it shrivels up and falls off. I had that happen more often than not. I lost at least three, so was starting to think about hand pollination, but then I didn't get any more female blossoms. Fortunately a few days ago I got one more, and without any interference on my part it is turning into a pumpkin.
This is especially good because it means I will have a pumpkin in October. The first one is already ripe.
Also, they are kind of small. Spirit may not be the breed for me, but also there is reason to believe that I am kind of the opposite of a green thumb with pumpkins, and am going to have to keep making slow incremental process.
At least my cherry tomatoes are going strong.
They may be going a little too strong. I should have guided their early growth more. They are now a gloriously messy bush, that frankly may have been responsible for suppressing Jet Star. They come in so many different sizes that I have no way of knowing if they are ten percent bigger than they would be otherwise. I have to consider the basil claim not validated at this point.
Still, even without either reserving a community garden plot or rototilling, I grew stuff. I have those cherry tomatoes I coveted now. I wanted more than one pumpkin, but even before I had to admit that my pumpkin growing was a big improvement over last year. Now that is doubly true.
That's how my garden grows.
I did plant the one cherry tomato plant and the one pumpkin plant. I did plant the lettuce tray. They it just didn't feel like enough.
Also, as I looked up the pumpkin type that I had got, Spirit, it seemed like they wouldn't be big producers. It might be a good idea to get another one. I went to the garden center searching for two more tomato plants (because I had two more tomato cages), a basil plant, and one more Spirit pumpkin.
The pumpkin plants were completely gone, and I had no idea there were so many types of basil. I went with Sweet Italian because that seemed most likely to have a kinship with me. For tomatoes I got one Early Girl (I have always been fond of that breed) and one Jet Star, because that's Ray Toro's Danger Days alter ego and that was awesome.
Ultimately, I probably should have stuck with one tomato and one pumpkin.
The lettuce tray never did a single sprout. I am not sure how it managed to fail so badly.
Jet Star only had one tomato, and Early Girl looks like there will be a total of six when the rest ripen. Those are both good breeds, so I am wondering if they were just put in bad spots. I did add plant food and egg shells to the soil, but they are closer to the concrete and their spots did not have the soil worked as much by the ivy. Maybe it was the exact wrong kind of basil.
(Incidentally, I keep finding new ivy sprouts in odd places. I suspect that will go on for a while.)
I also for a long time only had one pumpkin.
Even without the crookneck squash encroaching, I guess pumpkin fertilization is not a guarantee. You see, pumpkin blossoms are gendered. You get a lot more male blossoms, and you need more quantitatively, but you still need some female blossoms, because only they will become pumpkins.
A female blossom is recognizable by the green knob at the base of the flower. If she gets fertilized, that know grows bigger, and a darker striped green, then keeps getting bigger and turns orange. (Well, the color changes can be different for different breeds, but that's how mine went.)
If the blossom doesn't get fertilized, it shrivels up and falls off. I had that happen more often than not. I lost at least three, so was starting to think about hand pollination, but then I didn't get any more female blossoms. Fortunately a few days ago I got one more, and without any interference on my part it is turning into a pumpkin.
This is especially good because it means I will have a pumpkin in October. The first one is already ripe.
Also, they are kind of small. Spirit may not be the breed for me, but also there is reason to believe that I am kind of the opposite of a green thumb with pumpkins, and am going to have to keep making slow incremental process.
At least my cherry tomatoes are going strong.
Still, even without either reserving a community garden plot or rototilling, I grew stuff. I have those cherry tomatoes I coveted now. I wanted more than one pumpkin, but even before I had to admit that my pumpkin growing was a big improvement over last year. Now that is doubly true.
That's how my garden grows.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Earthquakes and the individual
I am not done with all my asking around yet. Most of the contacts are related to getting better at recovery, which will be a community effort. How long will it take PGE to get electricity running again? How long does ODOT think it will take to get the roads in good order again?
Some of my thoughts come from a preview of an Oregon Field Guide that will be airing on Oregon Public Broadcasting on October 1st. That's not really that far away. Some conversations may be more productive afterward, though there is no reason not to talk about things now.
Even assuming the best case scenario, where communities up and down the coast prepare, with different levels of government cooperating with each other and with businesses and private citizens, it will not rule out the need for at least some level of personal preparedness.
I had noted a while ago that 72-hour kits seemed to have gone out of vogue, mainly because they were not going to last long enough. I am starting to hear a lot about kits again, but no longer with the 72 hours. They are less likely to give a time period.
The reality is, its hard to predict how long you might be roughing it, and the longer it seems like it might be the more discouraging it gets. It is nonetheless very empowering to prepare.
I think a good starting point is the results of the Aftershock tool, which were on the PBS site. For my address, these were the megaquake results:
Water will be available at distribution centers within about 2 weeks.
Natural gas will be back up within about 2 months.
Electricity will take closer to 3 or 4 months.
Police and fire response could take about 7 months to recover.
Water and sewer will take over a year to get operational again.
The restoration of top priority highways will take about a year and a half.
Getting health care facilities back to normal will take about three years.
There had also been details like structures being damaged, which means we might not be able to stay in the house.
Let's take it line by line.
Even under best-case scenarios, it's very likely that there would still be a two week delay on water, so putting in a two week water supply is smart. If you have your own well, that may seem like a non-issue, but study what issues would be likely to cause operation issues or contamination. A lot of our food storage will require water for cooking, so that is another factor to consider.
There will probably be a time period without heat. Do you have extra blankets. If you are having to sleep outside, do you have sleeping bags and tents that can endure lower temperatures. Personally, I worry more about losing air conditioning on warm days than heat on cold days, but both are possibilities.
There will likely be a time period without electricity. Do you have flashlights? Do you have replacement batteries for those flashlights? Do you know how much light they give, and whether it will work for necessary tasks? Do you have an alternative means of cooking, and know whether it is safe to use in the house (most are not)? If gas comes back before electricity, which is likely, will your gas appliances work without electricity available for the controls?
Also, and this is very important, if electrical power has been knocked out but you have gas where the lines have potentially been disrupted, so there could be a leak, do you have glow sticks so that you will not cause a spark by turning on a flashlight and possibly ignite the whole place? (There are sparkless flashlights available, but you would have to seek it out.)
With health care facilities, roads, and emergency services, there are a few different things to think of. Having a 4x4 can be nice, but that's a bigger investment than buying a Sterno stove or some lanterns. There will probably be some time cut off from resources.
Food storage is good. Food storage that contains variety, including some things that can be eaten without cooking, is even better. We are working on three months, but we would love to have a year. Having a garden where you grow some of your own is nice.
Knowing first aid, so you can be of assistance when you cannot get the professionals, is really good. Also, thinking about things like if you have some time where you can't get prescriptions filled, or if you have a household member who uses oxygen, or equipment that requires electricity, takes some thought.
It is great to get neighbors involved too, so that they know that they can come to you, and you know you can go to them. If we get a year's supply of food for the house, and none of the neighbors had food storage, we could help feed them and that would be great, but supplies would run out pretty fast. If everyone has a few months worth, that helps us get along better. It takes away a lot of the stress because we know we won't starve or fight each other over food.
I know that some people could see that there are seven months without the cops and decide the best response is to stock up on guns and ammo. People who encourage you to buy gold are also anticipating the total breakdown of society, but where they still believe that gold will be valuable for barter.
I still think I would rather have a supply of food than gold, because if there is no one to trade with, or they are trading more gold, or ammo, well, the food is going to be useful no matter what. More to the point, I think a great part of preparedness is to prepare to not have a total societal breakdown. There are a lot of people I care about out in society. There are people I don't know too, but I would probably like them if we met - I'm pretty good at liking people.
So when I am looking at what Metro is doing and wondering what OHSU's plans are, that's why. I'm not interested in being a survivalist if that means cutting myself off, and not caring about the people around me. That can't possibly be right.
So on October 1st I will be watching "Unprepared". I will be recording it. I will be listening for the part I can play. There are some good resources at the site already.
I will be thinking about me and my household, but I can look beyond that too. That's something we need to do together.
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
Some of my thoughts come from a preview of an Oregon Field Guide that will be airing on Oregon Public Broadcasting on October 1st. That's not really that far away. Some conversations may be more productive afterward, though there is no reason not to talk about things now.
Even assuming the best case scenario, where communities up and down the coast prepare, with different levels of government cooperating with each other and with businesses and private citizens, it will not rule out the need for at least some level of personal preparedness.
I had noted a while ago that 72-hour kits seemed to have gone out of vogue, mainly because they were not going to last long enough. I am starting to hear a lot about kits again, but no longer with the 72 hours. They are less likely to give a time period.
The reality is, its hard to predict how long you might be roughing it, and the longer it seems like it might be the more discouraging it gets. It is nonetheless very empowering to prepare.
I think a good starting point is the results of the Aftershock tool, which were on the PBS site. For my address, these were the megaquake results:
Water will be available at distribution centers within about 2 weeks.
Natural gas will be back up within about 2 months.
Electricity will take closer to 3 or 4 months.
Police and fire response could take about 7 months to recover.
Water and sewer will take over a year to get operational again.
The restoration of top priority highways will take about a year and a half.
Getting health care facilities back to normal will take about three years.
There had also been details like structures being damaged, which means we might not be able to stay in the house.
Let's take it line by line.
Even under best-case scenarios, it's very likely that there would still be a two week delay on water, so putting in a two week water supply is smart. If you have your own well, that may seem like a non-issue, but study what issues would be likely to cause operation issues or contamination. A lot of our food storage will require water for cooking, so that is another factor to consider.
There will probably be a time period without heat. Do you have extra blankets. If you are having to sleep outside, do you have sleeping bags and tents that can endure lower temperatures. Personally, I worry more about losing air conditioning on warm days than heat on cold days, but both are possibilities.
There will likely be a time period without electricity. Do you have flashlights? Do you have replacement batteries for those flashlights? Do you know how much light they give, and whether it will work for necessary tasks? Do you have an alternative means of cooking, and know whether it is safe to use in the house (most are not)? If gas comes back before electricity, which is likely, will your gas appliances work without electricity available for the controls?
Also, and this is very important, if electrical power has been knocked out but you have gas where the lines have potentially been disrupted, so there could be a leak, do you have glow sticks so that you will not cause a spark by turning on a flashlight and possibly ignite the whole place? (There are sparkless flashlights available, but you would have to seek it out.)
With health care facilities, roads, and emergency services, there are a few different things to think of. Having a 4x4 can be nice, but that's a bigger investment than buying a Sterno stove or some lanterns. There will probably be some time cut off from resources.
Food storage is good. Food storage that contains variety, including some things that can be eaten without cooking, is even better. We are working on three months, but we would love to have a year. Having a garden where you grow some of your own is nice.
Knowing first aid, so you can be of assistance when you cannot get the professionals, is really good. Also, thinking about things like if you have some time where you can't get prescriptions filled, or if you have a household member who uses oxygen, or equipment that requires electricity, takes some thought.
It is great to get neighbors involved too, so that they know that they can come to you, and you know you can go to them. If we get a year's supply of food for the house, and none of the neighbors had food storage, we could help feed them and that would be great, but supplies would run out pretty fast. If everyone has a few months worth, that helps us get along better. It takes away a lot of the stress because we know we won't starve or fight each other over food.
I know that some people could see that there are seven months without the cops and decide the best response is to stock up on guns and ammo. People who encourage you to buy gold are also anticipating the total breakdown of society, but where they still believe that gold will be valuable for barter.
I still think I would rather have a supply of food than gold, because if there is no one to trade with, or they are trading more gold, or ammo, well, the food is going to be useful no matter what. More to the point, I think a great part of preparedness is to prepare to not have a total societal breakdown. There are a lot of people I care about out in society. There are people I don't know too, but I would probably like them if we met - I'm pretty good at liking people.
So when I am looking at what Metro is doing and wondering what OHSU's plans are, that's why. I'm not interested in being a survivalist if that means cutting myself off, and not caring about the people around me. That can't possibly be right.
So on October 1st I will be watching "Unprepared". I will be recording it. I will be listening for the part I can play. There are some good resources at the site already.
I will be thinking about me and my household, but I can look beyond that too. That's something we need to do together.
http://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/
Monday, August 10, 2015
A simple reminder
This weekend I had too many things to do, and a few unexpected things went wrong. I was determined to still post more on earthquakes though, and then I wrote something up for my journal and felt to share it.
While there shouldn't be anything embarrassing in it, it is not my story so I will remove names. Then we can get back to earthquakes next week.
While there shouldn't be anything embarrassing in it, it is not my story so I will remove names. Then we can get back to earthquakes next week.
I am the ward librarian, and the lost and found is in the library. I got a call from a member of the ward about a week and a half ago. She had lost her makeup bag at church.
That may not sound like a big deal, but it would expensive to replace, especially the brushes.
Nothing like it had been turned in, and she had done searched the
building already. I wanted to help, but I knew it was not in the library. I had an impression, and I had to start off with I knew it would
sound facetious, but I told her to have her children pray that she would find it.
That came
from a lesson someone else gave on prayer, and a story she told. She was sitting for her nephew once and he wanted to play a game but a piece was missing. The nephew wanted to pray to find it, and she didn't want to, because then if they didn't find it then it would be
the opposite of faith promoting. She didn't say that of course, but he prayed and found it right away.
It
reminded me that children are much better at having faith about things like
that. If the piece had been destroyed or something, maybe that wouldn't be
answered, but it can be a relatively easy prayer to answer and why not try
that?
Anyway, she took my advice in the spirit in which it was intended, and said she would do that. I ran into
her in the bathroom the next Sunday and it had been found. After we got off the phone, one child was in bed already,
but she got her daughter and asked her to pray. About two hours later someone was going by the bishop's office and something caught her eye
and she found it. Because there had been internet messages other people were
able to connect them, and she got the bag back.
She was
also able to make it a teaching moment for her daughter. She explained that she had to do work
like searching and asking other people, including me, but that helped the prayer be answered. That built faith for both of them.
So I
had to share that with the one who gave the lesson. She was going to let her nephew know that
he touched people.
It's a good
reminder that sometimes we sell ourselves short. Even knowing God's power, we
don't take full advantage of it. Maybe we don't believe that we are important enough, or that the things we want are important enough. Maybe we feel embarrassed about the things we want, and don't need to.
It's good to stop and remember
that our Heavenly Father does love us, and is capable of quite a bit.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Earthquakes: Asking around
I did write to my company's disaster management person this week. It is reasonable to as your employer about their plans for the big one, and to have a talk about disaster planning in general.
It is not only your employer. If you have children in school or daycare, you should ask about that. If you have elderly parents in an assisted care facility, you should ask about that. It is highly possible that they will not have answers. In light of the article from The New Yorker, more people may be thinking about it, but not sure what to do. That would be a good time to offer to help.
In one of the pieces I have been reading recently, someone was talking about parents wondering if they should be homeschooling to avoid having their children squished in an earthquake. That's an overreaction. First, see if the school has a plan. If they don't, offer to help with that project. If the school is really resistant to making any plans, then maybe you think about transferring or going to the district. There's lots of steps before deciding on retreating from society.
Backing up a little, in my message, I put that while I was interested it would probably be more beneficial to write an article that everyone in the company would see, and that's what they are focusing on. That means me getting my answer may take a little longer, but I still feel it was the right way to go about it. This is something that concerns everyone.
Your company may not have a specific person over disaster preparedness. It is necessary for a larger company because there is so much more to look out for - more employees, more property, more processes - but even a single proprietor should know that there are risks and have a plan for them.
Even if you are only responsible for yourself as an employee, preparing for the "big one" is not a single person activity. The restoration of utilities matters. The rebuilding of infrastructure matters.
Here is a tool to get an idea of recovery time from a 9 magnitude earthquake:
http://www.opb.org/aftershock/
I will use the results for Aloha, but I have also run through Portland and Lake Oswego and they were all pretty close.
Water will be available at distribution centers within about 2 weeks.
Natural gas will be back up within about 2 months.
Electricity will take closer to 3 or 4 months.
Police and fire response could take about 7 months to recover.
Water and sewer will take over a year to get operational again.
The restoration of top priority highways will take about a year and a half.
Getting health care facilities back to normal will take about three years.
Those estimates sound dire, but here is something else to consider.
After the earthquake an tsunami in Japan, most hospitals were operational again within a month.
Not all of these wait times are inevitable. With preparedness, both to withstand better and recover faster, it can be a lot better.
But that won't happen solely through the efforts of a bunch of rugged individualists. Retrofitting hospitals and relocating schools takes cooperation and commitment, because it takes money. Corporations and governments and utilities need to be working together, as well as individuals.
I will be asking some more questions this week. One question may get other people thinking and planning, but it can also be rather easily ignored. It's better if more people are asking.
Talk to neighbors. Talk to local leaders. And talk to you boss.
http://www.redcross.org/prepare/location/workplace
It is not only your employer. If you have children in school or daycare, you should ask about that. If you have elderly parents in an assisted care facility, you should ask about that. It is highly possible that they will not have answers. In light of the article from The New Yorker, more people may be thinking about it, but not sure what to do. That would be a good time to offer to help.
In one of the pieces I have been reading recently, someone was talking about parents wondering if they should be homeschooling to avoid having their children squished in an earthquake. That's an overreaction. First, see if the school has a plan. If they don't, offer to help with that project. If the school is really resistant to making any plans, then maybe you think about transferring or going to the district. There's lots of steps before deciding on retreating from society.
Backing up a little, in my message, I put that while I was interested it would probably be more beneficial to write an article that everyone in the company would see, and that's what they are focusing on. That means me getting my answer may take a little longer, but I still feel it was the right way to go about it. This is something that concerns everyone.
Your company may not have a specific person over disaster preparedness. It is necessary for a larger company because there is so much more to look out for - more employees, more property, more processes - but even a single proprietor should know that there are risks and have a plan for them.
Even if you are only responsible for yourself as an employee, preparing for the "big one" is not a single person activity. The restoration of utilities matters. The rebuilding of infrastructure matters.
Here is a tool to get an idea of recovery time from a 9 magnitude earthquake:
http://www.opb.org/aftershock/
I will use the results for Aloha, but I have also run through Portland and Lake Oswego and they were all pretty close.
Water will be available at distribution centers within about 2 weeks.
Natural gas will be back up within about 2 months.
Electricity will take closer to 3 or 4 months.
Police and fire response could take about 7 months to recover.
Water and sewer will take over a year to get operational again.
The restoration of top priority highways will take about a year and a half.
Getting health care facilities back to normal will take about three years.
Those estimates sound dire, but here is something else to consider.
After the earthquake an tsunami in Japan, most hospitals were operational again within a month.
Not all of these wait times are inevitable. With preparedness, both to withstand better and recover faster, it can be a lot better.
But that won't happen solely through the efforts of a bunch of rugged individualists. Retrofitting hospitals and relocating schools takes cooperation and commitment, because it takes money. Corporations and governments and utilities need to be working together, as well as individuals.
I will be asking some more questions this week. One question may get other people thinking and planning, but it can also be rather easily ignored. It's better if more people are asking.
Talk to neighbors. Talk to local leaders. And talk to you boss.
http://www.redcross.org/prepare/location/workplace
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Putting our lives back together after that The New Yorker article
I was going to write about the article more this week anyway, but I saw a pretty good responding article which I am sharing here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403522/-So-About-That-Cascadia-Article#
This is a recommended read.
I appreciate the even-handedness of this article. The New Yorker's take was full of gloom and doom. It is possible that the melodramatics will cause some people to face the issue that have previously been ignoring it, it is just as easy that the perceived hopelessness of the situation will lead people to bury their heads in the sand in despair.
So, yes, the earthquake threat is not new. People have been aware of it for decades now, and some people are doing things differently - that's why I was writing newsletters about it back in 2008. There is also room to do more.
There were four main points that stuck with me out of the original article. The first was about the duration:
"Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0."
While it is well known that the magnitude gets bigger exponentially, can still be hard to understand the difference between 6.9 and 7.5. Fifteen seconds to thirty seconds is more comprehensible, and then thinking of 15 seconds to 4 minutes, and how much more shaking that is, kind of sinks in.
The second thing that stuck with me was that I am not aware of any magical properties of I-5, where saying everything west of I-5 is toast could be anything but a simplification. Maybe I'm wrong and Lake Oswego will be miraculously unharmed while Tigard and Tualatin are destroyed.
It probably makes more sense to imagine that while the Coast Range will protect those to the West from tsunamis, the significant shaking will not only cause damage to buildings but also roads, and so getting access to those communities will be more difficult. As you continue heading East - depending on where the epicenter was and all the other factors - there will start being less damage and more access.
(Next week it will probably make sense to talk more about those issues, including liquefaction, but I want to get to the other two points.)
The Gearhart school situation stuck out to me. No one wants to imagine a school full of children being wiped out by a tsunami. That has already happened too often. However, my first thought was perhaps you could build a pathway over the bog. I have seen trails built over marshy lands before.
That may not be practical, so maybe they will need to look at building a new school. That's expensive, but new schools do need to be built periodically. If a tsunami comes tomorrow that won't work, but if the earthquake is three or thirty years away, it's doable. It's at least worth looking at the issue.
Finally, I was struck by the predicted economic collapse; I'd never heard that one before. On the one hand, if you have no utilities or infrastructure it sounds plausible, but there are many business for whom it would not be plausible.
I work for a company that provides health insurance in four states, including Washington and Oregon. We have a business presence and physical locations in all four states. There will be lots of people alive, they will still need insurance - I don't think we'll just pull up stakes, but electricity and internet are necessary.
Fortunately we have a contingency planner. I meant to write to her this week, and I didn't get around to it. I wasn't expecting an answer this week necessarily, but still I did procrastinate. I intend to write to her next week.
It makes perfect sense to ask if your employer has a plan for a big earthquake. There are some other good places to ask, and we will get more into that next week, but I wanted to make one final point here. We may not get to everything right away, but keep them in mind. I think writing to our planner this week versus next week will have little impact. Never asking would. Waiting two years to ask might. Try to maintain some balance between doing everything in a panic versus not getting to anything at all.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403522/-So-About-That-Cascadia-Article#
This is a recommended read.
I appreciate the even-handedness of this article. The New Yorker's take was full of gloom and doom. It is possible that the melodramatics will cause some people to face the issue that have previously been ignoring it, it is just as easy that the perceived hopelessness of the situation will lead people to bury their heads in the sand in despair.
So, yes, the earthquake threat is not new. People have been aware of it for decades now, and some people are doing things differently - that's why I was writing newsletters about it back in 2008. There is also room to do more.
There were four main points that stuck with me out of the original article. The first was about the duration:
"Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0."
While it is well known that the magnitude gets bigger exponentially, can still be hard to understand the difference between 6.9 and 7.5. Fifteen seconds to thirty seconds is more comprehensible, and then thinking of 15 seconds to 4 minutes, and how much more shaking that is, kind of sinks in.
The second thing that stuck with me was that I am not aware of any magical properties of I-5, where saying everything west of I-5 is toast could be anything but a simplification. Maybe I'm wrong and Lake Oswego will be miraculously unharmed while Tigard and Tualatin are destroyed.
It probably makes more sense to imagine that while the Coast Range will protect those to the West from tsunamis, the significant shaking will not only cause damage to buildings but also roads, and so getting access to those communities will be more difficult. As you continue heading East - depending on where the epicenter was and all the other factors - there will start being less damage and more access.
(Next week it will probably make sense to talk more about those issues, including liquefaction, but I want to get to the other two points.)
The Gearhart school situation stuck out to me. No one wants to imagine a school full of children being wiped out by a tsunami. That has already happened too often. However, my first thought was perhaps you could build a pathway over the bog. I have seen trails built over marshy lands before.
That may not be practical, so maybe they will need to look at building a new school. That's expensive, but new schools do need to be built periodically. If a tsunami comes tomorrow that won't work, but if the earthquake is three or thirty years away, it's doable. It's at least worth looking at the issue.
Finally, I was struck by the predicted economic collapse; I'd never heard that one before. On the one hand, if you have no utilities or infrastructure it sounds plausible, but there are many business for whom it would not be plausible.
I work for a company that provides health insurance in four states, including Washington and Oregon. We have a business presence and physical locations in all four states. There will be lots of people alive, they will still need insurance - I don't think we'll just pull up stakes, but electricity and internet are necessary.
Fortunately we have a contingency planner. I meant to write to her this week, and I didn't get around to it. I wasn't expecting an answer this week necessarily, but still I did procrastinate. I intend to write to her next week.
It makes perfect sense to ask if your employer has a plan for a big earthquake. There are some other good places to ask, and we will get more into that next week, but I wanted to make one final point here. We may not get to everything right away, but keep them in mind. I think writing to our planner this week versus next week will have little impact. Never asking would. Waiting two years to ask might. Try to maintain some balance between doing everything in a panic versus not getting to anything at all.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Earthquake! - Summer Rerun edition
I remain distracted from the series I was working on.
In this case, the New Yorker ran on article on the expected earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and it has triggered many other articles, and a lot of people are feeling a bit panicky and thinking of moving.
Well, I would not make the decision to move without serious prayer, but remember, we have known that we are due for a large earthquake here for some time. It's good to think about it, but it would be silly to start freaking out now, mostly because freaking out isn't helpful.
I did an earthquake series in 2008 that I am going to post links to now, and they still contain pretty good advice. There are some new things to consider, and we will do that too, but this week, let's just review the basics.
Before the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/03/june-2008-before-earthquake.html
During the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/02/april-2008-during-earthquake.html
After the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/02/may-2008-after-earthquake.html
If you want to see what has everyone so stirred up, here is the New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
In this case, the New Yorker ran on article on the expected earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and it has triggered many other articles, and a lot of people are feeling a bit panicky and thinking of moving.
Well, I would not make the decision to move without serious prayer, but remember, we have known that we are due for a large earthquake here for some time. It's good to think about it, but it would be silly to start freaking out now, mostly because freaking out isn't helpful.
I did an earthquake series in 2008 that I am going to post links to now, and they still contain pretty good advice. There are some new things to consider, and we will do that too, but this week, let's just review the basics.
Before the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/03/june-2008-before-earthquake.html
During the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/02/april-2008-during-earthquake.html
After the earthquake: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/02/may-2008-after-earthquake.html
If you want to see what has everyone so stirred up, here is the New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Priceless Blessings of the House of the Lord
That's a lesson title in President Benson manual.
I wrote last week's post because I was afraid that the testimony meeting would be horrible, and I wanted to have my thoughts organized and clear just in case. The reading of the letter went much better than expected, and there was only one horrible testimony, but the meeting was almost over then so I let it go. It might come out a little this week.
This week I am teaching Relief Society (as a sub), and I want to get all my thoughts out here so that only the ones that are pertinent to the class come out.
A lot of my feelings about the temple lately have centered around the family history that I am working on.
To give some context, my parents were both converts and joined after they were married, so there wasn't a history of church membership, though as you get further out into cousins sometimes you can find some others here and there.
There were still several people that were interested in genealogy, including my grandmother Harris. She had one cousin of her own, and one cousin of her husband's, who were both really into it, and had a lot of information going back which my grandmother collected and then gave to my father when he asked for it.
My first interaction with it was in social studies in junior high, when creating a family tree was among the project choices. I created a great one, because all the material was there, but I couldn't leave it at that, because there were heartbreaking stories. My grandmother had a twin who died. On my mother's side, her grandmother died in childbirth, with twins who also died, and because her grandfather had to work, my mother's mother was primarily raised by nuns. There was one family on the Davison side that lost four children to disease in two weeks. They had other children later, but for then they had no children left.
The great thing about the temple is that it can heal these wounds. I submitted my first names for temple work then. At the time you filled out sheets by hand and mailed them to Salt Lake, and then they could send cards to the temple you specified, or you could just ask for the work to be done.
There have been other spells of submission. Marguerite Rippey was the Harris cousin, and some other cousins took her work and put it in a book. That was the first thing I really entered into Personal Ancestral File. The first batch I'd submitted happened before I'd ever gotten on a computer.
As I got some Harris names ready, now we used computers. You would take them to a Family History Center on a disk, and it would check there for approval, and then you could take them to the temple to be printed into cards. This was progress.
Later another cousin sent me hundred of pages on the Bobiers. A different cousin I had never met contacted me, and he had a smaller batch of information on the Chaffee side, but it still filled in some blanks.
Every time someone would randomly hand me pages of genealogy I would take it as a sign that there were people ready, knocking through the veil. I would submit more names. After that I started hitting snags.
I tried preparing another batch in 2002, and when I got to the Family History Center none of them were approved. I tried a really big batch and the same thing happened.
Five years ago we could start getting things approved over the internet. It occurred to me that what was needed was organization. I would start going through and see of all the people in PAF, who had work done and who needed it, and submit that way. However, it occurred to me that with such a large database (about 7500 names) that it could be a long time until I would get to anyone, so I submitted another large batch in the meantime, with over 300 names.
That was too much to manage. I hadn't meant for it to get that big, but it added up really quickly. It takes a long time, and then we don't have any active men in the family, so I would part those out and one guy who swore he could get all the initiatories done really quickly lost about 40 of them. About a year ago I started getting e-mail from other people on the lines pointing out that these names had been reserved for a long time. They were generally nice about it, but I still felt ashamed.
I released some names, reprinted some, and I still have several cards left from this batch, but it feels more manageable.
The spreadsheet had gotten discouraging too. The idea was to write if they needed submissions, or research, or were done, but I got so scared to write "Done". Okay, their work was done, but their children weren't sealed to them yet, so would they feel done? What if I was missing information, like what if this person I thought hadn't got married really did?
I have pulled myself together now. If I have the children entered, then being sealed to their parents is part of their ordinances, and will be attended to. If I don't have everything that happened to everyone, I do still have a lot to work with now. When I have finished checking all 7500, maybe I will feel a need to research different things. I mean, I have gotten unexpected leads when they were necessary before.
The other thing is that so much has happened since that had nothing to do with me. Those names that didn't get approved were because someone else was working on them, or they were already done. There have been more done since I had stopped looking at it. I am not alone in this work. I may not know the other people doing it, but they are still helping me, and we are sealed together across many generations.
A few weeks ago we had a temple day where we took names all the way through, and six women in my family were able to have their work completed.
As I fill in ordinance completions, I see many where their work happened really close together. It could have been something like my experience, but for many of them I think it was that they had to travel to the temple, and make the most of it. There has been sacrifice.
That makes me think of a few things. One is gratitude at the increase in temple construction. My parents and my brother had to travel to Oakland. By the time I was in Young Women's it was Seattle, and before I was out it was Portland. We are so lucky. I think there were 58 temples when I went into the Missionary Training Center; there are now 147 operating, with another 31 under renovation, construction, or announced.
It has also become easier to arrange to do baptisms, with limited use recommends and temple assisted ordinances.
It is easier that we can do check and submit names at home with an internet connection, and can take names to whichever temple we choose. Families in different areas needed to coordinate a lot more before.
It is wonderful that home computers and internet also allow people of all ages to do extractions. People who may not have the resources to research their own can participate in this way, improving the resources for others and also learning more that will help them when they are ready to research their own.
So this is the thing held over from last week, when one testimony was very upset about how we are losing our rights. Putting aside for the moment that there has never been (nor should be) an actual right to force people to live the way we think they should, what rights are being infringed?
No one is stopping us from praying, or attending church. No one is stopping us from attending the temple. No one is stopping us from keeping our covenants. Only we can do that.
I love being at the temple; getting there is a different story. Finding the time and changing clothes and preparing mentally takes some work, but if I don't do that, that's on me.
There are so many blessings and opportunities available. Different ones will fit into your life at different times, but there will be something. Make room for it.
I wrote last week's post because I was afraid that the testimony meeting would be horrible, and I wanted to have my thoughts organized and clear just in case. The reading of the letter went much better than expected, and there was only one horrible testimony, but the meeting was almost over then so I let it go. It might come out a little this week.
This week I am teaching Relief Society (as a sub), and I want to get all my thoughts out here so that only the ones that are pertinent to the class come out.
A lot of my feelings about the temple lately have centered around the family history that I am working on.
To give some context, my parents were both converts and joined after they were married, so there wasn't a history of church membership, though as you get further out into cousins sometimes you can find some others here and there.
There were still several people that were interested in genealogy, including my grandmother Harris. She had one cousin of her own, and one cousin of her husband's, who were both really into it, and had a lot of information going back which my grandmother collected and then gave to my father when he asked for it.
My first interaction with it was in social studies in junior high, when creating a family tree was among the project choices. I created a great one, because all the material was there, but I couldn't leave it at that, because there were heartbreaking stories. My grandmother had a twin who died. On my mother's side, her grandmother died in childbirth, with twins who also died, and because her grandfather had to work, my mother's mother was primarily raised by nuns. There was one family on the Davison side that lost four children to disease in two weeks. They had other children later, but for then they had no children left.
The great thing about the temple is that it can heal these wounds. I submitted my first names for temple work then. At the time you filled out sheets by hand and mailed them to Salt Lake, and then they could send cards to the temple you specified, or you could just ask for the work to be done.
There have been other spells of submission. Marguerite Rippey was the Harris cousin, and some other cousins took her work and put it in a book. That was the first thing I really entered into Personal Ancestral File. The first batch I'd submitted happened before I'd ever gotten on a computer.
As I got some Harris names ready, now we used computers. You would take them to a Family History Center on a disk, and it would check there for approval, and then you could take them to the temple to be printed into cards. This was progress.
Later another cousin sent me hundred of pages on the Bobiers. A different cousin I had never met contacted me, and he had a smaller batch of information on the Chaffee side, but it still filled in some blanks.
Every time someone would randomly hand me pages of genealogy I would take it as a sign that there were people ready, knocking through the veil. I would submit more names. After that I started hitting snags.
I tried preparing another batch in 2002, and when I got to the Family History Center none of them were approved. I tried a really big batch and the same thing happened.
Five years ago we could start getting things approved over the internet. It occurred to me that what was needed was organization. I would start going through and see of all the people in PAF, who had work done and who needed it, and submit that way. However, it occurred to me that with such a large database (about 7500 names) that it could be a long time until I would get to anyone, so I submitted another large batch in the meantime, with over 300 names.
That was too much to manage. I hadn't meant for it to get that big, but it added up really quickly. It takes a long time, and then we don't have any active men in the family, so I would part those out and one guy who swore he could get all the initiatories done really quickly lost about 40 of them. About a year ago I started getting e-mail from other people on the lines pointing out that these names had been reserved for a long time. They were generally nice about it, but I still felt ashamed.
I released some names, reprinted some, and I still have several cards left from this batch, but it feels more manageable.
The spreadsheet had gotten discouraging too. The idea was to write if they needed submissions, or research, or were done, but I got so scared to write "Done". Okay, their work was done, but their children weren't sealed to them yet, so would they feel done? What if I was missing information, like what if this person I thought hadn't got married really did?
I have pulled myself together now. If I have the children entered, then being sealed to their parents is part of their ordinances, and will be attended to. If I don't have everything that happened to everyone, I do still have a lot to work with now. When I have finished checking all 7500, maybe I will feel a need to research different things. I mean, I have gotten unexpected leads when they were necessary before.
The other thing is that so much has happened since that had nothing to do with me. Those names that didn't get approved were because someone else was working on them, or they were already done. There have been more done since I had stopped looking at it. I am not alone in this work. I may not know the other people doing it, but they are still helping me, and we are sealed together across many generations.
A few weeks ago we had a temple day where we took names all the way through, and six women in my family were able to have their work completed.
As I fill in ordinance completions, I see many where their work happened really close together. It could have been something like my experience, but for many of them I think it was that they had to travel to the temple, and make the most of it. There has been sacrifice.
That makes me think of a few things. One is gratitude at the increase in temple construction. My parents and my brother had to travel to Oakland. By the time I was in Young Women's it was Seattle, and before I was out it was Portland. We are so lucky. I think there were 58 temples when I went into the Missionary Training Center; there are now 147 operating, with another 31 under renovation, construction, or announced.
It has also become easier to arrange to do baptisms, with limited use recommends and temple assisted ordinances.
It is easier that we can do check and submit names at home with an internet connection, and can take names to whichever temple we choose. Families in different areas needed to coordinate a lot more before.
It is wonderful that home computers and internet also allow people of all ages to do extractions. People who may not have the resources to research their own can participate in this way, improving the resources for others and also learning more that will help them when they are ready to research their own.
So this is the thing held over from last week, when one testimony was very upset about how we are losing our rights. Putting aside for the moment that there has never been (nor should be) an actual right to force people to live the way we think they should, what rights are being infringed?
No one is stopping us from praying, or attending church. No one is stopping us from attending the temple. No one is stopping us from keeping our covenants. Only we can do that.
I love being at the temple; getting there is a different story. Finding the time and changing clothes and preparing mentally takes some work, but if I don't do that, that's on me.
There are so many blessings and opportunities available. Different ones will fit into your life at different times, but there will be something. Make room for it.
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