Letters From Home

I know I haven’t updated in way too long.

I went to my 40th high school reunion, halfway across the USA, and I didn’t take a computer with me. I stayed with a good friend, and I could have used her computer if necessary, but there just flat-out wasn’t time to think about it.

I hadn’t been back there in 25 years, and it was so much fun to be welcomed back and to find out that the old high school cliques and exclusionary groups were well and truly dead and gone. People I never hung out with in school welcomed me back with just as much enthusiasm as did the people who were closer friends. It really truly was like going home, even though my family only lived in that town for three years and I didn’t actually graduate with my class (we moved away after my sophomore year).

I have met people who are still nursing old school grudges and wounds decades later. And people who always felt they were just too tragically hip for the room and no one could possibly have understood them, back then. Me, I didn’t have those problems. I was adequately popular and although I was no way part of the in crowd, several people who were, were my friends. I look back on high school as a good time.

The really sad part is that I am sure that if all those people who still hold grudges would just for pity’s sake go to a reunion they’d find soon enough that none of that stuff matters any more. To anyone. But it’s the people who really ought to go and have that revelation who don’t show. Their loss.

I’ll write again when I get done catching up on emails, LiveJournal, CompuServe, Twitter, Gizmodo, Lifehacker… you get the idea.

I was very happy I went, and I’m just as happy to be home!

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So, I got the new screen installed in the pod OK.  But after I put everything back together, the battery wouldn’t charge up.

I figured the old battery had probably died, and bought a new one.

New one wouldn’t charge either.

So I did a closer inspection and discovered that the plastic connector that attaches the battery to the motherboard had come completely loose.  Sigh.

I don’t think any home repair person can micro-solder like that.  I know I sure can’t.  So I guess now I put the pod up for sale “for parts or repair” and mention the nice bright new screen it’s got.

photo credit: coalandice

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I’ve been a fan of Vincent Bugliosi’s since the Helter Skelter days. The Manson bunch were held in the Inyo County Courthouse right up the street from where my grandmother lived, and F’zer and I were in Independence while they were filming the TV miniseries based on the book and we got to see Bugliosi’s alter ego walking across the street being filmed.

I’ve read most of Bugliosi’s books since then. Went to see him give a talk on his Supreme Court book just a few days before 9/11, as a matter of fact, and was very impressed by how he handled the standing-room-only crowd, including a few people who obviously went from talk to talk just to heckle.

In recent books, though, I think he’s gotten a bit too shrill. It isn’t enough to lay out the evidence, he has to hit you over the head with it again and again. Now, granted, there are plenty enough dullards out there nowadays that I’m sure he feels the approach is necessary, but since when did any of them ever read a book?

I just finished The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, and unfortunately it’s more of the same. Bugliosi makes the case, sure enough, but he obviously feels so strongly about the Bushwhackers that he pounds home every single point with all the facts and fury he can muster. Heck, I agree with him and I got tired of the assault long before I reached the halfway point in the book.

I know it’s infuriating to see so many people in the USA who are so utterly clueless about everything they see or hear on the news (if they pay attention to the news at all). I know it’s infuriating to see so many people so utterly incapable of thinking for themselves. (Which is why I wrote my series on taking a stand against ignorance to wind up last year.) It’s understandable for a man as intelligent and articulate as Bugliosi to take on the challenge of “telling it like it is” with regard to the Bushwhackers and their immoral and unnecessary war. But to write a book as though one is presenting a case to a jury full of dummies… well, unfortunately, it wears out its welcome before its time.

I’d like to see him write a companion book that isn’t quite so strident. There’s a case to be made. But this approach isn’t going to reach the people who ought to get it.

Perhaps for his next book Mr. Bugliosi could lay out the case (reasonably, not shrilly) for all the anti-gay-marriage statutes amounting to the establishment of a state religion, and therefore being unconstitutional? I for one would buy that book the day it hit the shelves.

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My 40th high school reunion is coming up in a few weeks (yes, I am that old). I’ve been trying to figure out what to pack, and it’s taking me a surprisingly long time to get my act together.

I know what I’ll wear to travel in, that’s not a problem. But there’s an informal get-together the day after I arrive (which needs its own outfit) and then the next evening is the more formal wingding (which needs a dressier outfit, as opposed to the casual clothing I’ll wear during the earlier part of the day). Then I have one day to just kick back with my friends and do whatever we think of doing, so that’s another outfit, and then I need travel clothing to go home.

So I figure probably two pairs of jeans, one pair of nice slacks, four t-shirts, two nice shirts, appropriate amounts of underwear and sleepwear and socks, at the very least. Should I take a sweater or wrap? Who knows. The weather there is vastly different from what it is here and even my friends don’t know the answer to that. And what kind of shoes? Probably my Crocs to fly in, and my huaraches for the rest of the time, but what about sneakers? Dunno.

And of course this will be my first trip as an insulin-using diabetic, and that adds on its own levels of complexity. I bought a case to hold the supplies and a Frio cooler pack for the insulin.

I bought a larger purse from the Travelsmith catalog, and dug up a leather eyeglass case from the Levengers catalog that I haven’t used in quite a while, to hold my sunglasses and my bifocals.

And then there’s the iPod for the trip, and maybe a paperback book or two (although I’ve got some really long audiobooks on the iPod as well) and assorted snacks because the airlines don’t feed people any more. And my CPAP machine in its bag has to go too.

I think I’m going to get more exercise schlepping my bags through the airport than I’ve gotten in three days at the gym.

But I’m still looking forward to it!

photo credit: wbskeet37

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I always like to try new things… well, most of the time. Right now, having fallen for the hype about ScribeFire, I’m trying to get it to post.

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It’s been a year or so since I discovered how insanely easy iPods are to fix.

Tonight I replaced the cracked screen in my video Pod. A fiddly job but surprisingly easy. I bought the new screen from an organization that recycles the usable parts from otherwise non-working iPods. So I saved quite a bit of money and helped the environment too.

eBay merchants FTW.
photo credit: Chris Devers

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